What if François Hollande was right in saying that “things are getting better”?
The indicator that the outgoing president had set had betrayed him several times with stressful yo-yo movements before finally improving, but it was insufficient to make it a campaign theme.
This failure to meet a primary commitment, the battle against unemployment, along with other circumstances, forced François Hollande to give up running for re-election.
A few days after his departure from the Élysée, the numbers are confirming the effectiveness, albeit relative, of the actions undertaken by the government.
In short, in politics, timing is also an important variable: things need to happen at the right moment and not afterward!
The unemployment rate in metropolitan France fell by 0.4 points in the first quarter to 9.3% of the active population in the metropolitan area and 9.6% in France as a whole.
France is dropping below the 10% threshold for the first time since autumn 2012.
This development is faster than anticipated by Insee, which had forecasted an unemployment rate of 9.5% in the metropolitan area (9.8% including the overseas departments) by the end of the first quarter.
Insee, which measures the indicator according to the standards of the International Labour Organization (ILO), recorded 2.7 million unemployed people in metropolitan France, a decrease of 115,000 over the quarter and a drop of 0.4 points compared to the fourth quarter of 2016. This reduction follows a slightly declining unemployment rate in 2016 (-0.2 points) for the second consecutive year.
