Surveys consistently rank the French as more unhappy about everything than their peers, even when things are going quite well
TUNE IN TO any French prime-time talk show this autumn, and discussion rages over the country’s wretched decline. France is losing its factories and jobs, squeezing incomes and small businesses, destroying its landscapes and language, neglecting its borders and squandering its global stature. Its people are fractious and divided, if not on the verge of a civil war, as a public letter from retired army officers suggested earlier this year.
Like others, the French have some good reasons for apprehension. Lockdowns have been wearing. Rising gas and petrol prices, supply-chain delays, a new wave of covid-19 cases and restrictions: all are genuine causes of uncertainty. Moreover, the French hold a presidential election in April, and the campaign is already divisive. The line-up is likely to feature not just one but two strong candidates from the hard right: Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally , and, a reactionary former TV pundit.
France’s unemployment rate, at 7.6%, has fallen below its level before the pandemic. This is not only, or even primarily, thanks to public wage-support schemes. In September the number of workers on furlough schemes dropped to 520,000, down from 8.4m in April 2020. “We are seeing net employment creation in France in sectors like manufacturing that we haven’t seen for a while,” says Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz, an insurer.
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