Published 2 September 2019 in Surveys
65% of French people approve of the idea that France makes tackling inequality a priority for its G7 Presidency in 2019. Only 8% of French people disagree.
In general, the fight against inequality is an important priority for French people, even if support for this principle tends to fall with age. From this point of view, the French government seems to have anticipated the interest in the issue, since the choice to make inequality a priority for the G7 Presidency was taken before the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Jackets) movement in autumn 2018, which brought issues of inequality to the forefront of the political and media agendas.
Digging deeper into this consensus, however, it is worth remembering that respondents’ positive response to inequality are in reaction to the context of a fairly vague proposal (improve inequality in the world) carried out by an international entity (the G7), with limited direct or immediate impact on the respondent or nationally in France. This percentage does not, therefore, represent a strong individual engagement from French people on the issue in itself. What is clear - and interesting - however is the very low percentage of those who opposed inequality as a priority for the G7 (8%) and fairly low percentage of those who neither approved nor disapproved (21%).