The deficit in our public accounts this year, greater than 6% of GDP, is gigantic, so much so that the markets are worried about it and are making us pay interest rates higher than Portugal or Spain. This deficit is so high that we can wonder how, without a major economic and social crisis, we could have gotten to this point. It is fashionable to joke about Bruno Le Maire, who has just left Bercy.
This relentlessness of the pack on the former Minister of the Economy offers a focal point for a now hysterical public debate on all subjects, but it misses the essential point.
The truth is this: this public deficit, which makes us a country under market surveillance and therefore less and less sovereign, we are all responsible, and all guilty. We are paying for nearly fifty years of collective financial and macroeconomic cowardice.
Bercy, a broken down Rolls
Guilty, the executive, well beyond the Minister of the Economy. The President of the Republic has never seemed very concerned about the sustainability of public accounts, to say the least. For seven years, from the yellow vests to the energy crisis, he has rather contributed to maintaining the nation in the idea that, faced with any problem, new public spending constituted the best response. Guilty also the Elysée and Matignon who refused in the spring of 2024 a corrective finance law in the face of the first symptoms of the accounts slipping, so as not to pollute the European election campaign with bad financial news. We see the result.
Guilty, the administration. Bercy is responsible for forecasting and monitoring revenue. In general, forecast errors do not exceed 2.5 billion euros. This year, there is a shortage of 20 billion euros in revenue. Bercy was until then considered the Rolls of ministries. Why this breakdown? The cause must be found. In a private company, such deviations would already have been punished.
Abstraction on the right, delirium on the left
Guilty is the right, incapable, during the first seven years of the Macron presidency, of proposing savings, especially during the energy crisis. For her, reducing expenses is an abstract concept, rarely documented. This is perhaps the reason why the return of a right-wing Prime Minister results in a fiscal shock of around 30 billion euros, without equivalent since the five-year term of François Hollande. For the right, we must reduce spending, but we never know what.
Also guilty is the current government, which explains that it is reducing public spending before increasing compulsory contributions, while it is doing the opposite.
The culprits are companies and their representatives, completely addicted to public spending. I remember, during the energy crisis, a meeting in the Vosges where leaders vigorously took the prefect to task, accusing him of “never doing enough”. A shame for a country in which aid to businesses represents the staggering sum of 140 billion euros. For many of them, living without state assistance means redefining their business model.
Let’s enter “rehab”
The French are guilty of making electoral choices without taking into account this constraint on public finances. We are cheerfully bashing the outgoing government but our fellow citizens have placed the National Rally at the top of the first round of the legislative elections, which takes them for fools by promising VAT reductions financed by the fight against tax fraud – a fight in which we are part. one of the world champions. The same French people placed at the head of the second round the program of economic and social destruction of the New Popular Front. In the country which holds the double record for public spending and compulsory contributions, the NFP has found nothing better than to propose an explosion of these two items, faithful to the delirium which serves as its program.
Putting France back on a sustainable financial trajectory is not the result of technical measures. It is a true cultural revolution, which can be summed up in an injunction intended for all: let us stop resorting to public spending indiscriminately. Let’s enter “rehab”.
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