Massive financial support of the State to compensate for the outbreak of energy prices prevents the President of the Republic from having to assume the political and social risks of a return to orthodoxy which seemed inevitable, to The outcome of the COVID-19 crisis.
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It was a little over a year ago, at the end of the summer of 2021. The assaults of the COVID-19 seemed to want to space and the electoral campaign started slowly. Obviously, after eighteen months of uninterrupted support for households and businesses, public finance issues were going to come back to the front of the stage.
Faced with the 150 billion euros mobilized by the public authorities, and with a budget deficit greater than 9 % of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country, difficult to look away. The 2008 crisis had shown it: France could lose the support of the financial markets at any time. “The whatever it costs is over,” warned the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, before the bosses gathered for the Medef summer university, preparing the minds for a form of budgetary standardization.
Inflation came to shake up the agenda
Politically too, the proponents of rigor thought that their time had come. The moment was conducive: across the Channel, faced with the flight of debt, the recovery of public accounts became priority, Boris Johnson having even announced tax increases for businesses.
In France, former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe launched his new party, Horizons, with a clear manifesto: “Putting order in the accounts.” And the right saw a boulevard open before her, preparing himself to attack Emmanuel Macron on his taxpayer money management, accusing him, according to the formula of Valérie Pécresse, of “Cramer the Caisse” with each of his ads.
Logically, the end of the COVVI-19 should have led to a phase of “budgetary consolidation”, as the experts say. But history did not go as planned. Inflation, caused by the deconfins and then the war in Ukraine, came to shake up the agenda, making any rapid outing of the economy support policies impossible. The executive had to keep the valves open, choosing to protect households more than everywhere else in Europe. An arbitration that the 2023 budget draft, whose examination starts in public session Monday October 10, in the National Assembly, comes again to confirm, with the maintenance of a price shield which will cost 45 billion euros per year Next.
In doing so, the Head of State did not have to assume the political and social risks of a return to orthodoxy which seemed inevitable. A scenario that was not happy. “A policy of austerity could have been explosive at the end of the health crisis, with the highlighting of the difficulties of workers of the first and second line, recalls Emmanuel Rivière, director at Kantar Public. Especially since the degradation of the services was an already very present theme before the COVVID. “
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