The government tried to prepare people’s minds, in vain. Unveiled this Tuesday morning by INSEE, the public deficit now stands at 5.5%, beyond the 4.9% initially announced by Bercy. Public debt stands at 110.6%, compared to 111.9% at the end of 2022. A slippage in French finances that Bruno Le Maire intends to control. Invited this Tuesday morning on RTL, the Minister of Economy and Finance, at the helm of Bercy for seven years, was confident. “Believe me, my determination to restore public finances and get the public deficit below 3% in 2027 is intact, I would even say that it is total,” he assured. An insufficient “determination” for the oppositions, who denounced in unison the budgetary incompetence of the government.
On the right first, where we tell the story of a France on “the same path as Greece”. Éric Ciotti, president of the Republicans (LR) and author of this comparison, added this Tuesday on swan. Mr. Macron is responsible for this disastrous record!” Same mocking reference to the famous Austrian composer among the leader of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, who ironically this Tuesday on LCI: “The two mandates of Emmanuel Macron, who was described as the Mozart of finance, risk ending on a requiem for public finances.”
Also read Nicolas Baverez: “The objective of reducing the public deficit below 3% of GDP is fiction”
On the left, the coordinator of La France insoumise, Manuel Bompard, guest of “Télématin” on France 2, pointed out “a scathing disavowal for the government”. And to expose the “two solutions to try to improve the situation”: “There is the solution in which the government is embarking today, that is to say (…) an unprecedented bloodletting on public spending, and I don’t think the country would recover. There is a second possibility, which is to increase state revenue.” L’Insoumis then called for “tax increases on the richest”. In his wake, the LFI president of the finance committee at the Palais Bourbon, Éric Coquerel, urged the government to “fetch revenue from the pockets of those whom Macron has stuffed with tax gifts and public money since 2017.”
Same story with the communist Fabien Roussel, who denounces a government made up of “white-collar crooks”. “These people lowered the state budget because they gave impossible gifts to the richest, to capital, to dividends, to the CAC40,” said the national secretary of the PCF, guest of the morning from TF1 this Tuesday. For her part, the boss of Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) Marine Tondelier believes that “the subject is not the number of billions of euros in debt, but why we get into debt”. Defending the idea of a “good debt”, the ecologist calls for massive investments in the ecological transition.
