The Minister of Public Accounts, Thomas Cazenave, presents the government’s stability program to the Council of Ministers this Wednesday. This document, which Le Figaro has obtained, records the budgetary commitments made by France to Brussels: it promises that the public deficit – which is currently at 5.5% – will fall below the 3% mark. here 2027. A trajectory judged harshly by the High Council of Public Finances, which denounces a “lack of coherence” and even a “lack of credibility”, according to the words of Pierre Moscovici collected by Le Figaro.
To achieve this feat, the government is effectively counting on economic indicators which, according to its forecasts, should almost all turn green by 2027. On growth, for example, while the executive had to lower its growth forecast for this year from 1.4% to 1% in February, the stability program predicts that it will return to 1.4% next year and that it will continue its rebound in 2026 and 2027 by reaching 1.7% then 1.8%.
According to the document, activity “would be mainly driven by the acceleration in household consumption, thanks to the decline in inflation which would support real wages and would also encourage a decline in the savings rate”. This drop in household savings would be “in particular supported by the drop below 2% in inflation” as well as “the anticipated end of the rise in food and energy prices – which increased the feeling of the inflationary shock “.
Same optimism on the unemployment front since the document proclaims that “the Government’s reforms would make it possible to achieve full employment” by 2027. Be careful, however, this dynamic would only begin next year since the government notes that “in a context of slowing activity, the rate of job creation decreased” in 2023 and that this slowdown should continue in 2024.
The government is also planning this pattern of inflection in 2024, followed by a rebound next year, for investment. “Total investment would decline in 2024 (−0.4% after 1.1%), which reflects in particular the effect of rates on investment in construction, before rebounding in 2025 (0.7%) “, we can read in the document.
To reduce the deficit, the government intends to stick to 0.4 points of GDP this year. But the increase is then rapid: it plans to reduce it by 1 point of GDP in 2025 – a very high step to take -, then by 0.5 point in 2026 and finally by 0.7 point in 2027 to reach the famous 2.9% deficit mark in 2027. This tour de force – which would correspond to around 20 billion savings per year, will be achieved by “controlling public spending without penalizing growth” assures the government. A point precisely on which the Court of Auditors highlights a “lack of consistency”.