This is the start of good news. In the Viavoice-HEC Paris-BFM Business-L’Express “Barometer of decision-makers”, a majority of French people (53%) favor budget cuts to clean up public accounts rather than tax increases. Finally, a little common sense, in a country asphyxiated by public spending and the gold medal of compulsory contributions. But the Prime Minister would be wrong to rejoice too quickly. Because another survey, signed Ipsos-La Tribune Sunday, reveals that so many French people are ready to censor the government, a sign of the rebellious climate at the end of the year.
Held at gunpoint by Marine Le Pen and her troops, blackmailed by a left won over by irresponsibility and supported with lip service by the tenors of the common base, all having their eyes fixed on 2027, Michel Barnier is aware that his days at Matignon are numbered. Will he manage to get his budget adopted? Will it last until Christmas?
Exit from the top of an even more gaping impasse
Stuck in an unprecedented political crisis for more than sixty years, France should not forget that it managed, in the past, to emerge from an even more gaping impasse. It was June 1958. The Fourth Republic was dying, the insurrectional climate in Algeria was spreading and economic bankruptcy was threatening. Called to the rescue, de Gaulle took the head of the last government of the Fourth Republic on June 1 and obtained extended powers until the end of the year. The very ones that Michel Barnier misses, lost in shopkeeper negotiations to close an impossible budget. “He locked himself into a negotiation process worthy of the Fourth Republic, and that is an error: he should have accepted the principle of a technical government,” scathes Jean-Marc Daniel, author of New lessons in economic history (Odile Jacob).
What did de Gaulle do in 1958? Not only did he bypass his ministers and political representatives, but he asked the economist Jacques Rueff to set up a committee of experts to prepare the country’s recovery. No sooner said than done: on November 18, 1958, the General gave the green light to the Pinay-Rueff plan, adopted by the Council of Ministers on December 27. Criticized from all sides on the left and right, by unions and employers, this shock therapy is immediately translated into ordinances, without the anointing of Parliament. On December 30, 1958, France had a road map, certainly harsh – tax increases, devaluation, cuts in public subsidies, deindexation of benefits, etc. – but which would allow it to return to a budget surplus in 1959 and to escape from the supervision of the IMF. If we must learn a lesson, it is the one given by General de Gaulle in his Memories of hope : “In the face of so many outcry, I see myself as the mechanic, who, in the American film, drives the train without listening to the alarm bells set off by worried or ill-intentioned travelers.” Michel Barnier, it’s time to adopt noise-cancelling headphones!