Can Wallonia save the jobs created by its zero long-term unemployment experiment?

Wallonia’s zero long-term unemployment experiment has now created more than 260 jobs, RTBF

For people living in Wallonia, the immediate issue is not an abstract employment-rate target. It is whether jobs created for residents who had spent years outside the labour market can continue, along with services developed around unmet local needs. RTBF reports that roughly 10% of beneficiaries had never worked before entering the scheme. That makes the programme unusually relevant to people whom conventional recruitment, training and activation measures have struggled to reach.

The initiative, originally called Territoires zéro chômeur de longue durée

The numbers require careful reading. In a May 2026 answer to Walloon MP Jean-Paul Bastin, Coppieters said the eleven projects retained after an earlier review had put 206 long-term unemployed people into work by the end of March, representing 187.2 full-time equivalents. Six further recruitments were under way, while supervision accounted for an estimated 45 to 50 full-time-equivalent posts. Those categories explain how the wider employment footprint can exceed 260 without implying that every post went to a long-term unemployed participant.

The programme’s trajectory has already been uneven. Wallonia initially selected seventeen projects, supported through a €104 million envelope planned for 2022-2026 and financed equally by the region and the EU’s European Social Fund Plus. Following an interim assessment, the Walloon government ended support for five territories in 2025 and continued eleven. It said the retained projects had demonstrated stronger results and local momentum; an economy-sociale sector report had previously warned that some projects struggled with complex regional and European grant rules.

Two interpretations now compete. Coppieters presents TerritoiR’ES as social innovation capable of returning people once described as “inemployable” to useful, open-ended work. The European Social Fund Plus uses a similarly broad frame: its account of a Liège project argues that communities may face a shortage of paid employment even when socially useful work remains abundant. In this view, the relevant outcome includes restored confidence, social participation and services that would otherwise not exist—not merely rapid movement into a conventional company.

The more demanding view comes from the government’s own decision to close five projects and concentrate resources on eleven. That approach treats demonstrable performance, sound local governance and complementarity with existing economic activity as conditions for continued public support. It also reflects a central question for Jeholet’s employment policy: whether bespoke, subsidised local jobs produce durable additional value compared with training, hiring incentives and direct matching to Wallonia’s numerous unfilled vacancies.

The European connection is financial and institutional, not simply symbolic. The ESF+ is paying half of the scheduled envelope, while the Walloon administration, the regional ESF agency, the Forem and local social-economy organisations oversee implementation. Once that programming period ends, EU participation does not automatically continue. A new Walloon legal and budgetary basis, another compatible European funding line, or a redesigned mechanism would therefore be needed to preserve the model.

No publicly confirmed post-2026 settlement has yet answered how many projects, workers or activities would be covered. That silence matters because the scheme relies on open-ended employment contracts even though its subsidy horizon is fixed. The next test is consequently political as much as statistical: Wallonia must decide whether the results justify moving TerritoiR’ES into ordinary policy, narrowing it further, or letting the experiment expire. Until the government publishes a financing decision and comparable cost-and-outcome data, the programme can demonstrate that it reached people far from employment, but not yet that their jobs have a secure future.