COPY LINK

POLITICS

French local paper takes on Macron’s ‘go find a job’ challenge

After French president Emmanuel Macron told the mother of an unemployed man that he 'could find 10 jobs' in Marseille's historic port area, the local paper decided to take him up on the challenge - and found 13 jobs.

Published: 27 June 2023 16:01 CEST

French local paper takes on Macron's 'go find a job' challenge

French President Emmanuel Macron on his three-day visit to Marseille. Photo by GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO / POOL / AFP

Macron had faced a barrage of criticism after he told the mother of a jobseeker that her son could easily find work.

In a typically robust exchange during a visit to the southern city of Marseille, the president told the woman her son could pick up to “10 offers” if he walked around the city’s historic Vieux Port area which is home to dozens of cafes and eateries.

His political opponents slammed him for minimising the problem of unemployment, but local paper La Provence decided to take him up on the challenge.

The regional daily sent a reporter out to the Vieux Port area of Marseille, and reported that they found no less than 13 job offers in one-and-a-half hours. The majority were minimum-wage jobs in hospitality, mostly seasonal for the peak summer tourist period.

Marseille’s Vieux Port is the city’s tourist hotspot, packed with bars, cafés and restaurants.

“What does your son want to work in?” Macron asked the woman during a walkabout in Marseille on Monday after she said her son, 33, could not find work and was in rent arrears.

“It does not matter… anything!” she replied.

Macron told her: “You are not going to persuade me that, if he is really looking for a job in Marseille, and that he is ready to take a job as a waiter, that there is no job as a waiter.

“I promise you: If I take a walk around the Vieux Port tonight with you, I’m sure we will find 10 job offers,” he said.

But the new head of the CFDT union, Marylise Leon, warned the president that “things were not as simple as all that”.

“What message is the president of the republic sending to people who are employed in cafés and restaurants – that they just have to knock on the door and get work?” she told BFM TV.

“It denies the skills and the difficulties of the working conditions,” she added.

MP for the hard-left France Unbowed party Mathilde Panot said “Macron has become a caricature of Macron”.

“Showing such contempt to people, the only unemployed person we hope for in the country is Emmanuel Macron,” she said.

Macron, 45, a former investment banker, has already had previous controversial exchanges over job seeking, in 2018 telling a young man he just had to “cross the street” to find work and telling another man in May work was just “one metre away”.

Since then, he has made lowering France’s historically high unemployment level a policy priority – the unemployment rate in France currently is at around 7 percent, its lowest level since the early 1980s, although youth unemployment is higher.

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.