The unemployment rate in France dropped below 10% during the second quarter of this year, and for the first time since 2012, according to figures released on Thursday by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). The news appears to pave the way for President François Hollande to announce his re-election bid in next year’s presidential elections but, as Martine Orange reports in this analysis of the figures, the slight fall in official jobless numbers cannot mask the grim reality of France’s endemic unemployment.
French telecoms operator SFR, which was acquired by the holding company of Swiss-based businessman Patrick Drahi in 2014, is losing subscribers to its mobile- and internet-based services by the hundreds of thousands. The haemorrhage threatens the future of the group, already struggling with heavy debts amid one of the toughest telecoms markets in Europe. Martine Orange analyses the cost-cutting, service-reducing strategy employed by Drahi, a champion of the technique of leveraged buyouts.
In its latest study on household income and capital, France's statistical agency INSEE notes that the median standard of living in France fell by 1.1% between 2008 and 2013, a drop not seen since records began in 1996. For the 10% worst-off families the fall was even greater, with their income falling by 3.5%. The agency writes of an “unprecedented worsening of poverty in France”. Laurent Mauduit reports.
Marine Le Pen, the head of France's far-right Front National has predictably welcomed Britain's vote to leave the European Union and has promised the French people a similar 'in-out' referendum if she is elected president. However, the idea of holding some form of referendum is also now gaining ground among presidential hopefuls on the mainstream Right, even if they are unwilling to give voters a straight choice between staying in or leaving the institution that France helped found. Aurélie Delmas reports on how the French Right is now extolling the virtues of national sovereignty in the wake of the Brexit vote.
The surprise vote in Britain highlighted numerous fractures within British society, in particular between old and young voters. As Mediapart English's Michael Streeter reports, the referendum also persuaded many disgruntled and impoverished working class voters to vote for the first time in years – and punish the Establishment elites.
Whichever way Britain votes in its referendum on EU membership this Thursday, French president François Hollande has promised new “initiatives” in the coming days to reinvigorate the European Union. Hollande himself has gone out on a limb by associating himself strongly with British premier David Cameron's opposition to so-called 'Brexit'. Meanwhile, as Lénaïg Bredoux reports, the French Left is itself split over the issue of Europe and how to approach it.
France’s conservative opposition party, Les Républicains, is gearing up for its primary elections in November. These will decide who will be the party’s candidate in presidential elections to held in May next year. There are 12 declared runners for the party’s nomination, with widely varying chances of success, and one notable as-yet undeclared candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, but who is certain to join the race. Aurélie Delmas looks at the policy propositions from the front runners, who all promise an undiluted dose of neoliberalism, spelling attacks on public sector workers, the middle classes and those who depend on welfare benefits.
The US neoconservatives may have been discredited by the political failure of their adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have inspired a school of disciples in France who hold key positions in the presidential office and the foreign affairs ministry. René Backmann analyses the development of the French neocons and the influence they exert on President François Hollande and French foreign policy, and argues that their role in the multiple military interventions launched by Hollande has set in train a vicious circle of violence that is proving ever more difficult to control.
Many oil refinery workers, rail workers and aviation staff are on strike or set to go out on strike as France suffers fuel shortages and a power struggle between the government and those opposed to controversial labour law reforms. Union activists have criticised the “extremely violent” actions of the state in removing the blockade at the Fos-sur-Mer oil refinery in the south of France. But despite the growing impact of their industrial action, union militants admit that they will not continue the action on their own indefinitely without the help of workers in other sectors. Mathilde Goanec reports.
The late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously said: “There is no alternative”. This phrase, abbreviated to TINA, became a symbol of her liberal economic approach to government. Now, faced with potential rivals from the Left ahead of the 2017 presidential election, the French president François Hollande has coined his own version of TINA by declaring: “There is no alternative on the Left outside the line that I represent”. Hubert Huertas examines Hollande's high-risk strategy.
