When French carmaking giant PSA Peugeot-Citroën announced on July 12th it was to close its major assembly plant in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a deprived suburban town just north of Paris, a ripple of fear ran through the nearby sprawling housing estates. Several, like the infamous ‘Cité des 3000’, were originally built as of 1969 to house the plant’s workers and managers and their families. But they soon became ghettos where immigrants were dumped and unemployment and poverty were rife. While recent renovation helped roll back crime, youth unemployment currently runs at around 40%, and locals are now fearful of the future once more. Rachida El Azzouzi travelled to the Cité des 3000 where many inhabitants regarded PSA's now doomed plant as their last lifeline.
Like the rest of the eurozone countries, France is entering a recession, according to the latest quarterly report released this month by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). Mediapart co-founder Laurent Mauduit argues here why the INSEE report is both an indictment of President Nicolas Sarkozy's economic policies and a warning for the Left opposition, ahead of next year's presidential elections, that austerity measures do nothing but fuel the crisis.
France "may have entered a short, shallow recession", announced the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Monday, the smae day when the latest official French unemployment figures were also released revealing the total number of jobless of all categories had reached 4.8 million for the first time since 1999. Mediapart co-founder Laurent Mauduit argues that this sad state of affairs is the result of economic policies that feed speculation rather than fight it, part of a vicious circle that sees the multiplication of austerity measures that are strangling the economy, worsening rather than improving public deficits, and which have already created an exceptional level of social misery.
