Rarely has a silent man made so much noise. Arriving under the watchful eye of the cameras at the Medef summer university, organized over two days at the Longchamp racecourse in southwest Paris, Bruno Le Maire gave himself a fanfare farewell from the stands, where he was sitting as the resigning minister with another representative of the Attal government, the short-lived delegate for Housing, Guillaume Kasbarian. On stage, the spokesperson for the employers’ organization, Patrick Martin, warmly praised the record of the former Minister of the Economy in front of a crowd in ties who had come to listen to his inaugural speech under the bright sunshine of late August.
“Dear Bruno, we may have had disagreements on the pace of the CVAE elimination [NDLR : cotisation sur la valeur ajoutée des entreprises]but you have been a determined and decisive architect of these pro-business policies.” And to congratulate him for “[son] listen and [sa] responsiveness to Covid”. “For all that, thank you”, said Patrick Martin, prompting a loud round of applause to which Bruno Le Maire responded with a faint smile, his hand on his heart.
Forgotten are the quarrels between the Medef and the government over dividends in the midst of Covid, the tensions around the Agirc-Arcco supplementary pensions… And too bad for the mixed results of “BLM” in terms of purchasing power, reindustrialization and especially public finances – which earned it the opening of a European procedure for excessive deficit as a parting gift.
In this period of political uncertainty and economic uncertainty, “questioning or suspending the supply-side policy” initiated by François Hollande and deepened under the mandates of Emmanuel Macron, “will be paid for in cash”, the representative of Medef repeated over and over again. A support that Bruno Le Maire would certainly have appreciated in June, he who had called – in vain – on employers’ organizations, including Medef, to take a clear stand against the RN before the legislative elections.