No cohesion: French auditors savage Macron’s national youth plan

In a report published on September 13, the Court of Auditors gave a harsh assessment of the Universal National Service (SNU) that the president has been touting, highlighting the organizational difficulties and the failure in terms of “social inclusion and commitment”.

This 67-page report from the Court of Auditors has effectively put an end to the SNU, a system supposedly in support of the country’s disaffected and car-torching youth.

In most public-sector employment vacancies in the Paris region, young applicants are regarded as “undesirable” based on their residential addresses and identity photographs that accompany job applications, especially minorities and migrants who reside in the cités.

Five years after its launch, this civic service that the president wanted to make mandatory, has not yet met the objectives set by the wise men of rue Cambon. In their report, published on September 13, they denounced a “largely underestimated” cost and a governance whose “inter-ministerial dimension remains to be built”.

The authors of the report outlined a “total cost of 3.5 to 5 billion euros” per year and this “without counting the future investment costs in accommodation centers, the possible additional costs linked to the change of scale and the costs borne by other public financiers”.

High costs indeed, in view of the “context of budgetary restrictions” also advocated. These underline that for the year 2022 alone, when the system was being tested, “the cost per young person” amounted to “a minimum of 2 900 euros”.

In addition to the financial aspect of the operation, the Court of Auditors also highlighted social problems linked to “the foreseeable evolution of the public welcomed during the cohesion stays”, raising “moreover the question of adapting the level of supervision”.

The vitriolic report mentioned “unachieved” diversity objectives as well as juvenile criminal behaviour and explained that “an increased proportion of young people were reluctant to participate” in the SNU.

The auditors mentioned in particular 33 exclusions of volunteers for “reasons of assaults” in 2023, as well as a withdrawal rate of 28 percent. The wise men concluded their report by expressing their concern about the future of this system, in particular offering no real outcomes for an entire age group, i.e. approximately 850 000 young people.

Also, for the institution, “this prospect raises important legal and operational questions, in particular for accommodation and supervision”. The report denounced the scheme as “aberrant” and “costly”.

On social networks, teachers also criticized the cost of the scheme. “With the money from the SNU, I would like to take my students on an educational trip. The best cohesion in the world,” a high school teacher noted.

Les Républicains (LR) senator Cédric Perrin thought that the Court of Auditors “confirmed the fears that the Senate Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee expressed from the beginning: an exorbitant cost for an undefined outcome. France cannot afford to waste 5 billion per year on this ineffective system”.

When this scheme was announced, political parties on both the right and the left had already opposed it – particularly La France Insoumise.

But National Rally (RN) MP  Caroline Parmentier had also questioned the Minister Delegate in the committee at the Assembly in July 2023 on “the difficulties encountered this year by a young candidate to join the SNU”, testifying to the red tape in implementing this system.

The fundamental problem with such plans is that institutions are no longer adapted because they were designed at a time when notions of morality, honor and homeland still had meaning. Of course, there were always opportunists and careerists without faith or law, but that was the exception whereas it is now the rule in politics.

It is a feature of the rise of globalist banana republics: all without political independence and without international, economic or military influence. Everything that characterizes real democracy is vitiated by the interests of clans at best, individuals at worst.