Youth unemployment, a French scourge | EUROtoday

This February 10, the Minister of the Economy, Roland Lescure, wished to be severe: “We have won the fight against long-term unemployment, but there is a real challenge regarding youth unemployment. We have to fight. » The same morning, INSEE published the figures: 21.5% of workers aged 15 to 24 are looking for work, a proportion which increased by 2.4 points in the last quarter of 2025, much more than the overall unemployment rate, which only increased by 0.2 points over the same period, to reach 7.9% of the active population. That is, at the end of the year, 742,000 young people excluded from the labor market, 126,000 more in one year.

To this should be added young people neither in employment nor in training (“Not in education, employment or training”NEET), of the order of 1.5 million, a determine additionally growing within the final quarter of 2025. European statistics printed on Wednesday March 4 verify that France cultivates an unenviable specialty on this space. It is without doubt one of the nations the place the proportion of unemployed folks beneath 25 is the very best: 20.9%, in line with Eurostat’s methodology, slightly completely different from that of INSEE, when Germany is at 7.1% and the Netherlands, at 9.3%. Above all, whereas the pattern has been downward since October 2025 in a lot of our neighbors, equivalent to Spain, Italy, Poland and Greece, France is experiencing the strongest enhance in the complete European Union.

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