I agree, but how would you propose to lower the number of potential workers in France? For context, Macron tried to push the retirement age up, thus increasing the pool of potential employees.
This is of course a hard question. One step certainly would be to encourage French companies to hire and train their own population.
I don't think pushing up the retirement age matters too much for youth unemployement, as those two groups compete for very different jobs (no 60+ year old will start vocational training as a nurse).
"How do we make the economy good" is obviously an extremely hard problem. I think a very important question is whether the 17% are actively seeking for jobs or considering themselves already entirely removed from the system.
France has a large industrial base, with many, many large companies (and suppliers for those companies), training people to have skills relevant to those companies seems an important consideration.
