Emmanuel Macron’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire declared France was on the road to economic recovery, while admitting that large swaths of the population continued to endure unemployment and financial hardship.
The economy chief said France had regained the respect of its partners, adding that it now had an “extraordinary” international reputation.
Asked to comment on widespread claims the government was holding the country back after prime minister Edouard Philippe decided to withdraw Paris’ candidacy to host the 2025 World Expo citing “financial risks,” Mr Le Maire said: “We’ve already achieved a lot – we’re hosting the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympics. We can’t afford to spread ourselves too thin. It’s not because we’ve withdrawn our 2025 World Expo bid that we’ve given up and taken a step backwards.
“On the contrary, I think that Mr Macron’s France is a France that strives to conquer. We won the 2024 Olympics, the country’s economic growth is improving, and we have an extraordinary reputation abroad,” he told the French news channel BFM TV.
“While we must steer clear of triumphalism, we must also acknowledge our successes, and appreciate the fact that the country is heading in the right direction. Mr Macron has given France its fighting spirit back.”
However, when asked whether that meant France was “doing well. No. Not at all. Because saying yes would be failing to acknowledge the millions of people who remain beset by hardship. There is still a lot of social and economic suffering. Unemployment causes suffering, as does poverty. But we must fight back and choose not to give in to defeatism.
“What I can say is that France is doing better. I want to make that clear. We have also regained the respect of our international partners.”
In a New Year’s speech to representatives of different economic sectors in Paris last week, the finance minister said that the French economy had been gaining momentum since Mr Macron was elected to power last May, with business and consumer confidence hitting multi-year highs and a spike in job creation.
He said: “Growth is solid. It probably reached 2 percent in 2017 for the first time since 2011. In 2018, we’ll probably do better than our forecast of 1.7 percent.”