PARIS (Sputnik) – Over 50 percent of French citizens believe that the current economic policies of President Emmanuel Macron's government benefit the rich at the expense of less wealthy social classes, a Viavoice poll conducted for the newspaper Liberation showed.
"The reduction of housing subsidies and the reform of the solidarity tax on wealth stand out as the two least popular measures since the beginning of this five-year [presidential] term (with 58 percent and 56 percent of the French opposing the reforms, respectively), resulting in 53 percent thinking that that the [legislative] majority favors the wealthiest classes of the public, compared with only 12 percent indicating the middle class, 11 percent saying the working class, and only 13 percent pointing to 'all the French,'" the poll published late on Sunday read.
Some respondents, however, saw the reforms as beneficial. Specifically, 45 percent of the French feel the labor code changes will help small and medium businesses create jobs.
The poll also showed that a third of the French population supported protests directed at labor reform.
The survey was conducted online from September 12-13; 1,007 individuals aged 18 and up were polled.
Last Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets throughout France to protest Macron's labor reform, which aims to liberalize the country's labor market and tackle high unemployment rates. Many trade unions oppose the measure, regarding it as unnecessary and a way of depriving workers of their rights, since the reform would make it easier for enterprises to fire their employees.
Economists have associated France's generous labor laws with joblessness; the country's unemployment rate is currently 9.5 percent. While this is more than double that of the neighboring UK and Germany's unemployment rate was less than four percent as of July, according to tradingeconomics.com, it is the lowest rate the French have seen since 2012.
In August, the French government announced its plan to cut housing allowances, which account for some 40 billion euros ($48 billion) of the budget annually. That same month, French media also reported about the government's plans to transform its solidarity tax on wealth (ISF) into a tax on real estate, a move which many believed unfairly favored wealthy people. The ISF only applies to those with more than 1.3 million euros in assets.
