How useful the news sometimes seems! While he publishes The French way (Flammarion) whose back cover states: “Affirm France, build an innovative economy capable of financing our social model […] and to reduce the debt: these are the main lines of this new French path”, here is Bruno Le Maire caught in the whirlwind of a debate caused by the deterioration of public finances. Accentuate the fiscal pressure or perish, say some. Reason our public spending or nothing, replies the Minister of Economy and Finance, aware that he has, perhaps, before him one of those founding moments that political life offers in leap years.
Because since the rumor of a public deficit well above 5% of GDP in 2023 and specified by INSEE at dawn this Tuesday March 26, it has not escaped the tenant of Bercy that these old reflexes taxes which are re-emerging, including within the majority, can give him the opportunity to show himself to his advantage: guarantor of a certain Macronian blueprint from the start, and manager who is both rigorous and keen to rethink a French model geared towards attractiveness and having to reward more those who work. So, Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the National Assembly, and the others can well demand a tax effort, will hold her ground, “I say to the French: increase taxes, it will be without me, sorry, that things are very clear.” “Strength of soul and clarity”, he is wont to repeat. The accused (of letting the deficit explode) becomes the accuser: spending, taxes, those are the others.
Until the breakup? If, in private, he shared his fears a few weeks earlier – “The big risk of the five-year term is a huge step backwards. On taxes, will I win? I wouldn’t put my hand to cut” -, Bruno Le Maire is not one of those who leaves the ship in high winds. “Courage is holding your line.” The health crisis and the tormented geopolitical context have generated costs that it is time to curb. A crazy French propensity to consider any new expenditure as definitive. Latest example: the tariff shield for electricity prices. Hearing the LR and the left shouting against its suppression, the Minister of the Economy could not help but vituperate: “I am not going to have a lesson dictated to me by irresponsible people!”
To avoid ideological spin and remain faithful to the audacity promised in 2017, he hopes to obtain international taxation of billionaires but above all to open a reflection on our social model. Convinced that Marine Le Pen is attracting more and more middle-class employees, tired of financing our health system so heavily, Bruno Le Maire insists: we must address the subject. A desire which clashes with his experience of his seven years spent at Bercy, and which one of his political friends did not fail to remind him: “It’s as if Anne Hidalgo explained to us in two years that the streets of Paris are dirty, it will be complicated to exonerate oneself from responsibility.” Take responsibility or break up before it’s too late?
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