Economic surveys that are falling, productivity at half mast, an unemployment rate that is rising… Between the start of 2024, when the government was banking on an “OG effect” and the current period marked by a feeling of loss of control, the contrast is striking. Two elements pushed France towards the doldrums: the dissolution of the National Assembly announced by Emmanuel Macron in June and the slippage in public finances, unprecedented outside of times of crisis. How to bounce back? The slightest headwind today seems capable of plunging the country into the start of a recession. Will the fatal blow come from the bond markets? Unless the trade war or bad weather destroys several sections of our economy, already bloodless even before any budgetary effort. L’Express reviews the main risks facing the new tandem of ministers Eric Lombard (Economy) and Amélie de Montchalin (Budget).
It is a symbolic defeat from which Emmanuel Macron has never recovered. In May 2023, an Elabe survey for Les Echos and the Montaigne Institute reveals that 42% of French people feel that taxation has increased since the election of the President of the Republic in 2017. Only 28% of them think the opposite. However, the person concerned’s assessment “is one of the most ambitious in this area since nearly 50 billion euros in tax cuts – including 26 billion for households – have been achieved in a five-year period”, recalls then Lisa Thomas-Darbois, the director of studies at the Institut Montaigne.
A few months later, the barometer of the Council for Compulsory Deductions (CPO), an organization attached to the Court of Auditors, drives home the point: 75% of French people believe that the level of taxation is too high, 63% that they pay too much personal tax and 67% that public money is misused. “This level of rejection of the socio-fiscal system must make political decision-makers think,” Pierre Boyer, professor at Polytechnique and author of Can you be happy paying taxes? (PUF). In 2018, the increase in a fuel tax led to the first blockages of roundabouts by yellow vests. Seven years later, in an exacerbated context of fiscal discontent, the slightest spark escaping from a hastily cobbled together budget could reignite the embers.
Consent to tax… or to effort?
The optimists reassure themselves by brandishing the good citizenship of the French: 79% of people questioned by the CPO see the payment of taxes and social security contributions as a civic act. “Consent to tax is not damaged, analyzes Adrien Broche, head of political studies at the Viavoice institute. It is the consent to the effort which is increasingly eroded. A majority of French people consider that their leaders are the first responsible for the deterioration of the State’s accounts and that as such, they do not have to pay the price of an increase in taxation.” A crisis of confidence which increases with each new deficit, in a formidable snowball effect.
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