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French PM says coronavirus outbreak ‘under control’ but warns ‘life won’t go back to normal after May 11th’

France's Prime Minister on Sunday night declared the coronavirus outbreak in the country 'under control', but warned that when lockdown ends on May 11th "life will not go back to normal"

Published: 19 April 2020 18:00 CEST
Updated: 20 April 2020 15:11 CEST
French PM says coronavirus outbreak 'under control' but warns 'life won't go back to normal after May 11th'
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. Photo: AFP

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, addressing the nation live on Sunday night said: “The circulation of the virus is weak and contained.

“I am saying this with a lot of caution; the virus is under control.”

But the Prime Minister also warned that there was a long road ahead, saying “life will not go back to normal after May 11th”.

President Emmanuel Macron has already announced that France will begin to lift its strict lockdown conditions from May 11th – but the loosening of the restrictions will be slow and gradual.

READ ALSO 'Living with the virus' – the plan for life after lockdown in France

From May 11th schools and businesses will begin to reopen but bars, restaurants and cafés will not reopen until at least early summer while public gatherings will be be allowed until – at the earliest – mid July.

Describing the epidemic as a “crisis is of a magnitude that we have never experienced” Philippe said the next stage would be gradually changing lives to co-exist with the virus.

He said: “Our lives from May 11th won’t be exactly what we knew before the lockdown.

“We will fight this by changing our habits. This will be our next challenge, and we will make it.

“The goal of the lockdown was to decrease the number of hospitalisations and people requiring intensive care.

“To achieve that, it was important that the French respect the rules. In general, people have done that.”

“Another goal was to limit the virus to certain regions.

“That's what we have managed to do.

“This shows the civility of the French and the capacity to adapt to an extreme situation.”

The regions of Grand Est and the greater Paris Île-de-France region have been by far the worst hit by the virus, but Philippe presented scientific modelling showing that, without a lockdown, the majority of France could have experienced the same level of infections.

READ ALSO What do we know about the people who have died from coronavirus in France?

French government modelling showing the situation in hospitals with the lockdown and the projected numbers without lockdown

The fact that the virus was concentrated in certain areas has meant that patients could be moved out to other areas with fewer cases, and avoid intensive care facilities becoming overwhelmed.

The latest figures showed that 644 intensive care patients have been transferred – by specially adapted trains and by air – to other parts of France and over the border the Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Luxembourg.

France's death toll is now listed at 19,718 – 12,069 deaths in hospital and 7,649 in nursing homes, announced the Director General of Health Jérôme Salomon.

The deaths toll on Sunday for the past 24 hours in hospitals was listed at 395. For the 11th day in a row the number of patients in intensive care fell – by 89 people in the last 24 hours – and the overall number of hospital patients also fell by 29.

Visiting to the country's Ehpad nursing homes – which has been completely forbidden for more than a month – will be allowed in limited circumstances from Monday, health minister Olivier Véran added.

Government graphic showing intensive care occupation – starting from 5,000 beds at the start of the crisis, rising to 10,500 beds with an occupation level of 7,000 people.

Philippe also touched on the economic shock of the lockdown, with France projected to be facing its worst recession since 1945.

He warned: “The economic crisis is just starting. It will be brutal.

“We have never seen such a massive, general, brutal stoppage of the world economy.”

Latest figures show that economic activity has fallen by 36 percent since the lockdown began, with massive falls of 43 percent in industry, 88 percent in construction and 90 percent in the hospitality sector.

Philippe said that the government would be presenting its detailed planed for exiting lockdown within the next 15 days. There are several things that remain unclear – including how long the over 70s and others in vulnerable groups will have to stay confined and when international travel will be permitted again.

READ ALSO When will I be able to travel to France again?

But he stressed that the next stage will be 'living with the virus' and adapting behaviour over the course of many months until a vaccine is found.

 

 

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: France’s economy is far from doomed, but not quite booming either

Depending on who you ask, France's economy is either booming or doomed - John Lichfield takes a look at who is right and where French finances are heading.

Published: 15 May 2024 11:12 CEST
Updated: 18 May 2024 11:17 CEST
OPINION: France's economy is far from doomed, but not quite booming either

France is booming. France is also doomed. Take your pick.

On a much-visited French news site Le Figaro this week, consecutive stories collided head on.

The first story reported that the annual ‘Choose France’ conference will bring a record number of foreign investments to French soil in 2024 (56 projects worth €15 billion). France is the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment for the fifth year in succession.

The second story – an essay by the political commentator and pollster Jérôme Fourquet – said that the French economic model of the last 40 years, had “reached the end of the road and left the country in a cul-de-sac”.

France no longer “made anything”, the essay said. The economy was being kept alive by state and consumer spending, funded unsustainably by twin deficits of trade and public finance.

Which is true? Both, up to a point.

The Choose France foreign investment conference in Versailles this week will be the most successful since President Emmanuel Macron launched the project six years ago. France opened 200 more factories than it closed last year, returning to a modest trend of “re-industrialisation” interrupted by the Covid and Ukraine crises.

Jérôme Fourquet’s essay was brilliant but also over the top. It ignored some of the positive developments in France of recent years.

It suggested that France “made nothing” but also admitted that the country was a world leader in arms, cosmetics, perfume, luxury goods and wine.

France, Fourquet might have added, is also one of the world’s largest exporters of cereals. It holds a major part of Airbus, the world’s most successful plane-maker. Unlike the UK, it is still a train-maker and a car-maker, although both industries have declined.

All the same, the essay made good points about the “French model” created unconsciously over four decades by governments of Right and Left and only timidly changed by Emmanuel Macron’s Centre in the last seven years.

Fourquet defines the French model as “state-consumerist”, a mixture of excessive public spending and taxation and generous pensions and welfare payments which allow most French people to live reasonably well. Unfortunately, the high taxation is never enough to cover the public spending and the consumers consume more from abroad than the country exports.

The result is twin, expanding deficits in public spending and the balance of payments which cannot be sustained indefinitely.

In 2003, France’s accumulated state debt was the equivalent of 63 percent of annual GDP. It is now 110 percent of GDP. The annual service charge is about to overtake education as the single biggest item in the state budget.

In 2006, France’s trade deficit was €4.3 billion. In 2023, it was €99.6 billion (admittedly inflated by the high cost of oil and gas).

Fourquet says the cost and bureaucratic weight of the French state make creating businesses – and wealth and jobs – more difficult than in other EU countries. This is covered up by more state spending which, in turn, sustains consumer spending which, in turn, boosts the twin deficits. A vicious spiral.

He concedes that Macron has tried to chip away at the state in the last seven years. The President has also splashed the cash on pet projects and has done little to reduce the regulatory burden.

Rather than lighten the entire system, Macron suspends rules and norms when he wants to get stuff done (such as the rebuilding of Notre Dame cathedral). The success of his foreign investment drive is also partly based on “keys in hand” offers of low or no-regulation factory sites which are not always easily accessible to domestic investors.

Some of those criticisms are justified. Macron has not been the revolutionary that he promised to be in 2017. He has been a plodding state reformer, extending with some success the job-friendly policies introduced by President François Hollande. France being France, neither man gets any credit.

There are signs that the economic downturn late last year (and the explosion in the budget deficit) may have been a temporary set-back as Macron insisted. Growth in the first three months of this year exceeded expectations at 0.2 percent of GDP. Jobs are being created again. (More than 1 million extra jobs since pre-Covid days).

High energy costs are crippling business across Europe but they are lower in France than elsewhere. The boom in foreign investment in France has tended to be high in value but low in jobs. The industrious and energetic minister for industry and energy, Roland Lescure, says that is now changing.

One of the projects under discussion at Choose France is a home-grown plan for a €1.6 billion solar panel factory in the Rhône delta which would create 12,000 jobs.

So is it boom or is it doom?

Neither. There has been a gradual, positive shift in the French social-economic model in the last seven to ten years which Jérôme Fourquet plays down or ignores.

Macron promised to do far more but he has had to surmount to two international crises (Covid and Ukraine) and to adjust to two domestic revolts (Yellow Vests and pensions reform). His unpopularity is partly explained by his failure to sell a convincing narrative of reform; it is also explained by France’s obsession with “reform” (in the abstract) but hatred of all “reforms” (in detail).

But what are the alternatives? All the opposition forces, from far-left to far-right, offer policies which would preserve or worsen an unsustainable status quo.

Macron’s final three years are unlikely to achieve much in the way of new reforms. A recovery of the economy might warm attitudes to Macronism (a big ask) and allow his would-be successors in the Centre to block Marine Le Pen in 2027.

Otherwise, Le Pen’s zombie economics – extra spending, no new taxes, breaking the European single market – could tip a heavily indebted France into the abyss.

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