Macron lays out 'new method' to tackle urban poverty

President Emmanuel Macron outlined what he called a "new method" for improving lives in neglected and poverty-wracked areas of French cities on Tuesday after a series of shockingly violent incidents thrust urban crime into the spotlight. From thousands of extra places in daycare centres to corporate internships for students, Macron pledged to quickly implement "a different method, a different rhythm".
France's major cities are often ringed by crime-ridden public housing estates where immigrants and social problems have concentrated over decades - along with seething resentment about racism. Before his speech on the so-called "banlieues", Macron had signalled he did not intend to announce a grand new strategy backed by a pledge of increased public spending - as many of his successors have done.
"This strategy is as old as I am," the 40-year-old former investment banker told an audience of 600 lawmakers, company bosses and associations at the presidential palace. Instead, he outlined a series of smaller initiatives, insisting throughout that civil society groups, companies and local officials needed to find solutions at the grassroots level.
A modest increase in local policing and extra resources for schools in deprived areas have already been outlined by the centrist's government, but he announced a new effort to fight discrimination. France's biggest companies will all be tested in the next three years to see if they discriminate against ethnic minorities via undercover testing of their recruitment processes, Macron promised.
France has already trialled random testing which involves sending out several identical applications for job vacancies with traditional French-sounding names and foreign ones - then monitoring the reaction.
The lack of new figures for investments or landmark new policies led to criticism from some political opponents on Tuesday that Macron's strategy was too feeble. His address coincided with shocking images of masked gunmen opening fire in broad daylight on Monday in the southern port of Marseille, which were broadcast by French television channels.
The assailants, dressed in black and carrying Kalashnikov machine guns, recalled some of the homegrown jihadists who have spread terror in France over previous years.
Many of them have come from marginalised immigrant communities in suburban areas of French cities where fears about radicalisation and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam have grown. The Marseille incident was thought to be linked to a local turf war for control of the drug trade in the city, where tit-for-tat murders between rival gangs are common.