More than a million young people are now left to fend for themselves, without a job, without training, the vast majority of them aspire to only one thing, to give their lives a perspective both in employment and in their personal lives, emphasize Jean-Hervé Lorenzi and Helen Verryser.
From now on, it will be unreasonable to make a decision in our country without integrating the opinion of the youth simply because they represent the future of our country. This is particularly evident for global warming, just as much for public debt, surely for the evolution of the relationship to work and necessarily for the absolute necessity of investing massively in the digital sectors. That is why we felt it was so important to include in the debate the perception that 60,000 young people had of their situation and their future.
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Why is that? Because the debates we will have in Aix this summer must take this vision into account. This is how a real conversation was launched, not just a simple poll, the results of which are exceptionally striking because they reflect French youth as a whole. They are young French people between the ages of 18 and 30, students pursuing general or professional courses, who have dropped out of school, are in a reorientation phase, young workers or are looking for a job.
The goal? To offer them an authentic space for expression and sharing, where the hot topics that impact our daily lives – citizenship, the environment, education, work, mental health, to name a few – can be discussed freely. An ambition animates this approach, to paint a realistic portrait of the challenges facing young people and to sketch the contours of the France of tomorrow.
The France of tomorrow
Three themes have been identified as crucial: equal opportunities, global health, and citizen action. The results are clear: the most important of the results is the fact that more than four-fifths – 84% to be precise – of them believe that success in life is not just about earning money, one can imagine the very strong implications that this can have on the job market and the lifestyles of the next generation.
But behind this first result, which outlines a desired France for the future, the view of the current world is much more worrying, one in two young people does not feel good in their current life and has already sought help, three-quarters – more precisely 74% – of young people have already suffered harassment or some form of discrimination and two-thirds of young people surveyed do not feel represented by anyone in politics.
A cruel look at current events
Thus, the subjects that engage the most are the lack of political representation, malaise and also the role of sport as a lever for social inclusion.
This unprecedented conversation definitively commits us to initiating an economic debate, committed, pragmatic and, above all, collective. More precisely, this cruel look at current events forces us to propose short-term solutions.
More than a million young people are now left to fend for themselves, without a job, without training, the vast majority of them aspire to only one thing, to give their lives a perspective both in employment and in their personal lives. Initial efforts have been made since then, but remain very insufficient. We cannot afford to look without action on this specific situation – at least by its importance – in France. But it is above all the trajectories proposed to our youth, which are so discriminatory from early childhood, that must be fundamentally questioned.
This vision of 60,000 young people shows us the urgency, the decisions to be made, for the greater good of all generations, imbued with the simple idea that their world will be fundamentally different from the one we know today.
