The observation is clear. A mission of the Senate on the budgetary slippage scratched, this Tuesday, November 19, the previous governments, guilty according to her of a “inaction” and a “damaging wait-and-see attitude” in the face of the explosion of the deficit, expected at 6.1% of GDP in 2024, compared to 4.4% initially planned.
Bruno Le Maire, Gabriel Attal, Elisabeth Borne, Emmanuel Macron… After several hearings, the Senate Finance Committee spared no one when assigning responsibility for the major budgetary slippage that France has been experiencing for several months.
“To the general feeling of collective denial about the situation of public finances, is now added a feeling of irresponsibility on the part of those who were then in government,” said the rapporteur of this “flash” mission at a press conference. Jean-François Husson (The Republicans). “The government actually knew the critical state of our public finances from December 2023. It should, in our opinion, have reacted vigorously. But it did not do so,” continued the socialist president of the committee of Finance Claude Raynal.
“Short-sighted calculations”
The two senators also believe that many months were “lost” in the restoration of the accounts, due to the reshuffles and especially the dissolution, the premise of “too long a wait in the appointment of the new Prime Minister”. They also regret the absence of an amending budget in the spring, decided according to them by “short-sighted calculations” based on European elections and the risk of censorship.
The mission of the upper house, carried out at the start of 2024 and relaunched in recent weeks in the face of a much more worrying deterioration in the accounts than expected, is coming to an end just before the Senate takes up the draft budget of the State for 2025, examined in the hemicycle from November 25. And the National Assembly is preparing to take over: it will lead a commission of inquiry on the same theme in the coming weeks.
The issue is extremely sensitive, in the heart of a high-risk budgetary autumn for the government of Michel Barnier, threatened with censorship by the oppositions in the National Assembly, where the government camp is in the minority. Hence the interest for the Senate and its right-wing majority to burst the abscess as quickly as possible, to avoid repeating new “piloting errors”. Another interest for LR: to differentiate itself from the former Macronist majority, while the right is now part of the government coalition and tries to justify its support for a very unpopular budget, with 60 billion euros of effort requested from all the strata of the economy.
Internal notes
The two senators believe that state services had information on the slippage in public finances from the end of 2023 and that the government was slow to act or communicate on the subject. They are based in particular on various internal notes from the Treasury, as well as on a missive sent on December 13, 2023 by the Ministers of the Economy Bruno Le Maire and of Public Accounts Thomas Cazenave to Elisabeth Borne, then Prime Minister, recommending that she communicate on “the critical nature of (the) budgetary situation”.
“The ministers held a double discourse” between this internal note, perceived as an “alert” by Elisabeth Borne, and their reassuring public positions at the time, the senatorial mission is indignant.
During their hearings, the former officials defended themselves from any “concealment”, all ensuring that they had “controlled spending” and reacted quickly to economic updates, notably by freezing billions of credits. The explanation, according to them, lies above all in an error in the assessment of tax revenues, which were 41.5 billion euros lower than forecast.
Bruno Le Maire castigated the senators’ report this Tuesday, calling it an “indictment of political opponents”, “riddled with lies”. “We collectively anticipated, reacted quickly, reacted strongly against all opposition, in particular the Republican group and the Socialist Party group who continued to propose additional spending,” insisted the former Bercy resident during a briefing with journalists. “This is an unworthy attack based on allegations that are unrealistic or false,” said former head of government Elisabeth Borne. Gabriel Attal had defended his former Minister of the Economy, criticizing a “scandalous political and media trial” against him.