Unemployment goes down, nobody cares

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EDITORIAL. Despite a historically low unemployment rate, the French have never been so angry and dissatisfied with their fate.

Par Pierre Antoine Delhommais

François Mitterrand facing Valéry Giscard d’Estaing during the televised debate between the two rounds of the presidential election, May 5, 1981. For more than fifty years, unemployment was the preferred argument of the oppositions to denounce the incompetence of the governments in place.
© AFP

Published on 03/02/2023 at 1:01 p.m.

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Excédent, debt reduction, we have so lost the habit in France of hearing these words that the financial results of Unedic present an almost supernatural aspect. In deficit every year since 2009 and following record holes of 9.3 billion euros in 2021 and 17.4 billion in 2020, the unemployment insurance scheme posted a positive balance of 4.3 billion last year. euros. Better still, Unedic plans to generate cumulative surpluses of 17.1 billion euros by 2025, allowing it to envisage a rapid repayment of its enormous debt (63.6 billion euros at the end of 2021). Faced with such good figures, one would almost come to wonder if the management of unemployment insurance has not been outsourced in secret to be entrusted to German employers and unions.

Besides the…