Unemployment in France dropped slightly in the first quarter of the year to its lowest rate in 14 years, giving President Emmanuel Macron a boost ahead of legislative elections.
According to the INSEE statistics agency this Tuesday, France’s unemployment rate slipped to 7.3 percent from 7.4 percent in the first three months of 2022.
A poll of 10 economists conducted by the Reuters news agency had expected the rate to remain unchanged.
This is the lowest level of unemployment in the country since the second quarter of 2008 – apart from an anomalous, unrepresentative drop at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when jobseekers could not look for work during a nationwide lockdown.
Apart from during that period, unemployment has come down steadily since Macron first took office in 2017, when the jobless rate stood at 9.5 percent.
Credit: rfi.fr
