If the episode of the “whatever it costs” fueled the image of the console or corrects, it also has reinforced the idea that the executive does not pilot and is often limited in his action. The finding of this impotence also fed abstention.
by
The senior official has had a shock. The last time Thierry Aulanon had led the cabinet of a minister of the economy, it was in the early 1990s. Income in Bercy in 2016, after almost thirty years in the private sector, it was stunned to see how much The state had changed. As if, in the field of economic policy, the latter had organized his own helplessness. “I felt that the action of the state had become much more difficult,” he summarizes.
In its astonishment report: European constraints that did not exist thirty years earlier, nor on the budget or debt or on industrial policy (through the Brussels state of State aid). “There were other difficulties, such as hyperinflation or fevering exchange rates, but no European constraints,” he notes. The constitutional council then, which has become “much more present than thirty years ago”, with a hundred decisions a year, of which a large part in the economic and financial field through the priority issues of constitutionality. Decisions “unpredictable and sometimes intervene for a long time after the rule of law was asked, in taxation for example,” he continues. The multiplication of independent authorities, finally (the National Commission Informatique et Libertés, for example). “There are hundreds, sometimes in areas I did not suspect. We can see the underlying logic. But the result is that the action of the executive is hindered.”
In fact, in thirty years, the panoply of economic policy instruments available to the state has reduced considerably. The economy has been liberalized into two successive waves, first in the 1980s – price control and foreign exchange is abandoned, the loans enhanced by the state deleted, privatized public enterprises. Then, in a more recent period, under the impetus of Brussels, which has placed the consumer at the heart of the European project with a policy of offensive competition, the restriction of state aid and, indirectly, of industrial policy. The European Commission has also pleaded – with a relative success – for greater budget orthodoxy with the single currency and the Maastricht Treaty, which also transferred monetary policy to a European Central Bank independent of political power, while the Bank of France was not until 1993.
You have 64.26% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.