At the beginning of August, Prisca Thévenot estimated that there would be “nothing worse than forcing a young person to do the SNU”. She is now talking about a possible obligation.
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The SNU, the universal national service could become compulsory. Questioned Tuesday September 19 by the online media Brut, Prisca Thévenot, the Secretary of State in charge of youth, affirms that the SNU must “can be a republican passage for an entire generation. There is no taboo. Today, the reality is to put in place all the modalities of execution so that at the national and territorial level, the SNU is ready to be generalized.”
However, on August 4, the same Prisca Thévenot gave a different speech, reassuring for the teaching unions, headwinds against any generalization.
“There would be nothing worse than forcing a young person to do Universal National Service. It would even be counterproductive.”
Prisca Thévenot, Secretary of State for Youthon franceinfo, August 4
The minister now returns to the initial line of Emmanuel Macron, who promised in his program for the 2017 presidential election “a short-term, compulsory and universal national service”.
A “political ambition”
Prisca Thévenot’s predecessor, Sarah El Haïry, announced in June the possibility for all volunteer second year students to carry out this service in the form of a 12-day internship, during school time, from March 2024.
That every young person can complete the SNU is “a political ambition”, now explains Prisca Thévenot in private. It is impossible to say how this obligation could be formalized. No bill to this effect is currently in the pipeline. The idea of a referendum was raised during the Saint-Denis Meetings around Emmanuel Macron and party leaders in August. “Make Nation” is one of the slogans of the moment, while the President of the Republic is still looking for a political response after the riots at the beginning of the summer.