Innovative schools, low-carbon port, digital capital: Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday outlined a new ambition for Marseille, calling on it to look “out to sea” and fully reconnect with its “Mediterranean destiny”. “This Mediterranean destiny, we can recapture it […] It’s an opportunity for the city, for the region, for the country”, launched the Head of State, on the second day of his visit, in the decor at breathtaking Fort Saint-Jean with the sea, the port and the hinterland on the horizon.
Continuing a series of announcements made since Monday as part of the Marseille plan in a big way, he promised to “make Marseille an exemplary port in terms of decarbonization of maritime transport”, with a faster decarbonization of the fleets to face the competition from other counters in the Mediterranean.
Emmanuel Macron also pleaded for the development of the “Hinterland” (hinterland) of the port by going “much faster and stronger on rail and river. At the end of 2022, he launched a “large port” project linking Marseille to Lyon, along the Rhone valley, for the transport of goods and energy. This corridor could be irrigated by “a dozen ports and connect to Bavaria” in Germany, he said Tuesday evening. Marseille must also become a “European digital capital”, with data centers and influence in cyber, he continued.
A “blue economy” school will also be set up on the port site, in L’Estaque, to train “thousands of young people” from poor neighborhoods north of Marseille, he said. The president also announced the launch of a Mediterranean Season for 2026, in order to bring out projects from “all the shores of the Mediterranean”. Finally, he called for the invention of a “new Radiant City” in the northern districts, to reintroduce beauty there, in reference to Le Corbusier’s building in the heart of the city.
In the afternoon, Emmanuel Macron announced that he was going to double the state envelope for public hospitals in France’s second city – up to 479 million euros -, with the added bonus of the reconstruction of the Armed Forces Training Hospital on a new site.
Earlier in the morning, from a school being renovated in the northern districts of the city, the president had welcomed the educational innovations launched in some 80 primary schools in Marseille. “We invented a new school […] At the beginning, if we speak frankly, there was a lot of reluctance, it completely upsets the basic ideologies”, conceded Emmanuel Macron, who wishes to see this laboratory of “schools of future” extended throughout France. But resistance remains strong, a large majority of the 470 schools in Marseille having not wished at this stage to engage in this system.
New argument for joining it: participating schools will be able to use the culture pass, currently reserved for middle and high schools. With educational experimentation, “the danger is that we no longer have to deal with a school of the Republic but with completely different schools depending on the territory”, leading to a “genuine breach of equal opportunities “, worries for her part Virginie Akliouat, departmental secretary of the FSU-SNUipp (first degree).
The Head of State, who imagines the second city of France as the laboratory of his public policies, also wants to “reopen” the debate concerning school time over the year, because “when we have a three-month vacation, the inequality is coming back,” he insisted. On Monday, he had already announced that he wanted to split the classes from the middle section of kindergarten, gradually widen the timetables in college until 6 p.m., and offer the possibility of entering school from the age of two.
The various left-wing mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, in any case welcomed the investments without “equivalent in the country since 1945 for schools”: “We will have finished by 2026 the renovation and reconstruction of 60 schools” , he promised, including the one overlooking the city of Castellane, where Zinédine Zidane grew up.
