Unemployment has reached a new high in the eurozone and inflation remains well below the European Central Bank’s target, stepping up pressure on EU leaders and the ECB for action to revive the bloc’s sickly economy.

Joblessness in the 17-nation currency area rose to 12.2 per cent in April, EU statistics office Eurostat said last Friday, marking a new record since the data series began in 1995.

With the eurozone in its longest recession since its creation in 1999, consumer price inflation was far below the ECB’s target of just below two per cent, coming in at 1.4 per cent in May, slightly above April’s 1.2 per cent rate.

That rise may quieten concerns about deflation, but the deepening unemployment crisis is a threat to the social fabric of the eurozone. Almost two-thirds of young Greeks are unable to find work, exemplifying southern Europe’s ‘lost generation’.

Economists and policymakers including Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, have said the greatest menace to the unity of the eurozone is now social breakdown from the crisis, rather than market-driven factors.

In France, Europe’s second largest economy, the number of jobless rose to a record in April, while in Italy, the unemployment rate hit its highest level in at least 36 years, with 40 per cent of young people out of work.

“I’ve sent CVs everywhere, I come to the unemployment agency every day, for three or four hours to look for work as a truck driver and there’s never anything,” said 42-year old Djamel Sami, who has been unemployed for a year, leaving a job agency in Paris.

Thousands of demonstrators from the anti-capitalist Blockupy movement cut off access to the ECB in Frankfurt on Friday to protest against policymakers’ handling of Europe’s debt crisis.

Some economists believe the ECB, which meets on June 6, will have to go beyond another interest rate cut and consider a US-style money printing programme to breathe life into the economy.

“We do not expect a strong recovery in the euro zone,” said Nick Matthews, a senior economist at Nomura International in London. “It puts pressure on the ECB to deliver even more conventional and non conventional measures.”

In the past, the euro zone has needed economic growth of around 1.5 percent to create new jobs, according to Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING. With the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasting this week that the eurozone economy would contract by 0.6 per cent this year, unemployment is set to worsen long before it turns around.

“We do not see a stabilisation in unemployment before the middle of next year,” said Frederik Ducrozet, an economist at Economist at Credit Agricole in Paris. “The picture in France is still deteriorating.”