You are never better quoted than by yourself, to use an old adage. Traveling in the North on Friday, Emmanuel Macron came to announce an investment of 1.5 billion euros in a lithium battery site in Dunkirk, just after the formalization of a next battery factory for electric cars. Surrounded by several business leaders, the President of the Republic then spoke in the middle of helmeted employees. At the end of his speech, the head of state was apostrophized by a young unemployed person. "I have a BTS electrotechnics, and I applied to a lot of offers in industry and steel, such as ArcelorMittal ...", begins this job seeker. Before being interrupted: "Give us your CV," says a boss who is at Emmanuel Macron's side.
If the sequence elicited some laughter in the audience, the moment was immediately seized by the President of the Republic. Who remembered one of his little sentences pronounced in 2018 to an unemployed horticulturist in the gardens of the Élysée. "A few years ago, it got me into a lot of trouble, I said you had to cross the street, there, you have to make a meter," jokes Emmanuel Macron. Five years ago, a few weeks before the yellow vest crisis, he awkwardly explained to this young man the ease with which job seekers could have a job: "Now, hotels, cafes, restaurants, I cross the street, I find you (a job, Editor's note). They just want people who are willing to work, with the constraints of the job." The protrusion had triggered, at the time, a generalized bronca in the political class, while blowing on the embers of social anger that was going to ignite.
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During a meeting organized by Le Parisien in April with the French, Emmanuel Macron had returned to this controversy. "Someone who despises does not go in front of the crowd. There are little sentences that I assume totally, hammered the tenant of the Elysee. When I answer a young horticultural man, with whom I speak for ten minutes and tell me that he is ready to look for a job in the restaurant industry, whom we cross the street to find, it is true. At the time, he never crossed the street, he turned down a lot of jobs, and never wanted to work in another industry." A continuity displayed by the Head of State between his two five-year terms that may surprise ... While he committed mid-April to "100 days of appeasement" for the country, after the very eruptive pension reform.