How did it come to this? The historic political crisis that France is going through today could be explained and embodied in a single word: downgrading. Downgrading of a part of the population, now convinced that their children will live less well than they did. Today, it would take six generations – or 180 years! – for a descendant of a family at the bottom of the income scale – the lowest 10% – to rise to the average level of the country, according to OECD projections. One of the worst results of the major developed countries.
France has also been downgraded compared to its European partners. A sad result, given that Emmanuel Macron dreamed – through arrogance or naivety – of writing the future of the European Union. To illustrate this decline, it is enough to follow the evolution of France’s GDP per capita compared to that of its neighbors over nearly two decades. While in 2000, wealth per capita was 15% higher than the European average according to Eurostat statistics, the gap fell to 10% in 2010 and has now been completely closed.
But there is something more worrying. As economist Véronique Riches-Flores points out, GDP per capita is now lower than the European average in 11 of the 13 regions of France, compared to only three in 2000. While the Ile-de-France region remains one of the richest regions in Europe – GDP per capita is nearly 60% higher than the continental average – in eight French regions, underperformance is greater than 15%. At the back of the pack are Corsica, Hauts-de-France, Centre-Val de Loire, Burgundy, Occitanie and Grand Est. These are regions where the vote for the National Rally has literally exploded in recent years. Not only is the hypertrophy of the Ile-de-France region, described in 1947 by geographer Jean-François Gravier in Paris and the French Deserthas not been resolved over the years, but a form of impoverishment of a large part of the country compared to the rest of Europe is now appearing. A deformation that neither Germany nor Italy have experienced. The reasons are obviously multiple, but the accelerated deindustrialization of the French economy over the past decades is undoubtedly not unrelated.