Obviously, the figure makes you dizzy: 164 billion euros in trade balance deficit in 2022 alone. A level unmatched since the end of the Second World War. This is 3.5 times the amount of credits that the State granted to Defense last year.
Obviously, it is a war deficit: nearly 80% of this abyss comes from the increase in the energy bill. Soaring gas and oil prices mechanically weighed on our purchases in value, while at the same time the closure of half of the nuclear fleet forced us to buy electricity at a high price from our neighbours, particularly the Germans. Added to this is the euro’s slide against the greenback, which made all the products denominated in dollars that we import more expensive.
We could continue to invoke the bad winds coming from Ukraine to justify this economic disaster. Thus continuing to veil the face. If the impact of the energy shock is real, these figures also reflect the country’s inability to reconstitute an exporting industrial France, despite calls for a start in recent years and tax relief. At best, the bleeding was stopped. As a recent study by the Rexecode firm reveals, the share of products made in France in total European exports has literally collapsed since 2000. France has not taken a step down, it has descended the stairs. No other country has experienced such a violent slide when the weight of the manufacturing industry fell to only 9% of national wealth in France, against 19% across the Rhine, 15% in Italy or even 12% in Spain. On this subject, France is on an equal footing with Greece, a Houellebecquian nightmare.
It floats like a perfume of defeat, like a perfume of 1983: the boomers will remember the twin deficits – deficit of the trade balance and of the State – which precipitated the devaluation of the franc in June 1982. A few weeks later, François Mitterrand began the turn of rigor. A trauma still as vivid among the socialists forty years later.
Today, the screen of the euro protects us. But the sanction of the financial markets could well be on interest rates and French government bonds. It is in the light of this risk that we must understand the stiffening of the government on the pension reform and the totem of 64 years.