I interpret this

eversince it's been weakened by Chirac's various governments since 2002, the job creation has been much weaker

as pointing out a correlation, and this

there may be no link

as hedging his bets by pointing out that "correlation is not causation".

I think it would be better if Jerome came out and actually argued that there is causation, because then we'd have a falsifiable hypothesis, but he's being a politician. </snark>

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman