The load is heavy. A transpartisan senatorial report, presented this Thursday, June 13, denounced the government’s “recklessness” regarding the budgetary slippage of recent months.
“No comparable crisis justifies the public deficit for the year 2023”, was alarmed by the general rapporteur of the Budget Jean-François Husson (LR) during a press conference held in the Senate, pointing out “a confusion between the solidity , the rigor of the figures and the political gamble” of the executive. The public deficit has in fact reached 5.5% of GDP in 2023, or 15.8 billion euros more than what the government had planned (4.9%). Which led him to cancel 10 billion euros of credits for 2024.
The socialist Claude Raynal criticized the “opacity of budgetary communication”, saying that it was “not prudent to cling all year to a deficit objective of 4.9% which has become unattainable”. The two senators in charge of this mission are particularly outraged by the government practice of carrying over budgetary appropriations from one year to the next, estimated for 2024 at 16.1 billion euros. A practice “not in accordance with budgetary rigor and transparency”, which makes it possible to “reduce the deficit of one year while gently increasing that of the following year”, scoffed Jean-François Husson.
Better transparency of public finances
The senatorial report, adopted unanimously with Macronist abstentions, thus proposes that the technical notes of the administrations be “made available” to the finance committees of Parliament, and that these committees be “seized” in the event of “alert on a possible departure of the estimates outside the confidence intervals”. He also recommends reviewing the terms of annual examination of the finance bill, with a “recalibration” during this examination “to avoid adopting a text which would have lost all link with economic reality”. Or even to require the government to present to Parliament a draft amending finance law in the event of a “significant change in forecasts”, which it did not do for 2024.
This “flash” information mission, launched at the end of March by the High Assembly, followed an on-site inspection carried out by the Senate Finance Committee in Bercy to clarify the conditions for the deterioration of the public deficit. Heard by the Senate, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire refuted any concealment. “All the information was given in good time to Parliament and the French, and all the necessary decisions were taken in good time to correct the consequences of lower tax revenues than expected,” he maintained.