Macron plan for French suburbs slammed as insufficient

President had pledged a change of tack to ‘emancipate’ inner-city and suburban youth

French opposition parties and media yesterday slammed President Emmanuel Macron’s plan for tackling urban poverty, saying the proposals unveiled a day earlier lacked ambition and were just for show.

Macron’s plan for improving the lives of around five million people in 1,300 poor neighbourhoods, including the high-rise, largely immigrant suburbs of Paris, had been keenly awaited. From creating more places in daycare centres for children from poor families to giving youngsters internships in big French companies, he pledged a change of tack to “emancipate” inner-city and suburban youth.

But the announcements, which came with no funding attached, fell far short of the mark for opposition parties, local officials and media. The leader of the main opposition Republicans (LR) party, Laurent Wauquiez, told LR lawmakers that Macron was the champion of “Kodak politics” focused on image-making which consisted of “talking and doing nothing”.

The mayor of the Bondy suburb in Paris, Sylvine Thomassin from the opposition Socialist party, said she was “disgusted” by the speech, accusing Macron of making a show of “breaking down doors that were already open”. She and other mayors took particular exception to Macron’s repeated swipes at how previous governments had failed to solve the problems of ghettoised communities, which they saw as smearing local officials. “I felt insulted by the president,” she said.

AP ■ Riot police officers detain a protester during a demonstration in Paris, Tuesday. French public services workers have gone on strike as part of their protest against a government plan to cut 120,000 jobs by 2022.