Bruno Le Maire put on his sales rep cap on Tuesday evening to reassure abroad after several nights of riots triggered by the death of young Nahel. The Minister of the Economy addressed international viewers, on CNN, to insist that the urban violence affecting France would have no consequences on the growth and attractiveness of the country.
On the second day of a relative lull, the minister called Nahel’s death a “tragedy” that was both “unacceptable” and “unforgivable”. “This will have no impact on French growth, on French attractiveness or on French tourism,” he said on CNN, speaking in English to an international audience.
An interview also in a British daily
“The French economy is solid, the daily life of French citizens is not threatened by what happened,” added Bruno Le Maire. “We are returning to a calmer situation,” he said.
“France is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world and we will do everything to keep it that way, naturally guaranteeing the safety of all tourists on French soil”, also declared the minister in an interview with the british daily The Telegraph. France also hopes to receive King Charles III “in the coming months”, he underlined, while the visit of the monarch had been canceled at the end of March due to social protests against the pension reform.
Battle of the figures on tourism
Earlier in the day, the French government had already wanted to be reassuring about a possible impact of the riots on tourism in Paris, at the start of the summer tourist season and one year before the Olympic Games organized in the capital. “You have to keep your cool, we don’t have a wave of cancellations in Paris,” said the Minister Delegate for Tourism, Olivia Grégoire. “We are holding on to tourism,” she insisted.
The platforms questioned by its teams reported a “wriggling at -0.5, -2%, but that does not allow any conclusions to be drawn”, assured the minister. However, according to the boss of the Paris Tourist Office, Jean-François Rial, the situation is more critical, with “thousands of cancellations”, which he had assessed on Sunday “around 20-25% on the clientele international” at the beginning of July in the French capital.
The employers’ union GNC, the National Group of Hotel Chains, has meanwhile identified “between 2 and 5% drop on (the) objectives for the first ten days of July” which “were very good”, indicated its president, Jean -Virgile Crance, evoking a “much more moral and sometimes material damage for the establishments affected”. However, activity “should remain good in the summer of 2023, except for a turnaround in the internal security situation”.