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How did France go from the 4.4% public deficit level that was initially forecast for the end of 2024, to the 6.1% that has since come to be expected? In other words, a €50 billion drift and an unprecedented amount outside of a crisis period? Was the 2024 budget insincere? Why were the figures that announced this spectacular nosedive not released until after the recent snap elections? Did the previous government hide the truth from Parliament and the French people? These are just some of the questions the parliamentary inquiry committee into the “public finance drift,” launched on Wednesday, October 16, at the Assemblée Nationale will look to answer. Prime Minister Michel Barnier said he was counting on this cross-party body to “tell the truth to the French people.”
Bruno Le Maire, who served as finance minister from May 2017 to September 2024, is at the forefront of the mystery. “I am naturally at [the] complete disposal” of the inquiry commission, the former minister wrote on X, on Wednesday: “I will answer all its questions in complete transparency.” Le Maire, who now teaches economics and geopolitics at a university in Lausanne, Switzerland, and has left the media spotlight since his resignation, had, in what may or may not have been a coincidence, invited a dozen MPs to lunch on Tuesday, at a Michelin star-winning restaurant located just a stone’s throw from the Assemblée. The former high-ranking minister said he was “delighted” at the prospect of “being able to establish everyone’s responsibility” before the parliamentary inquiry commission, according to one of the lunch guests.
Le Maire does not intend to be the only one to carry the burden of this unprecedented blunder. “We spent a lot,” he admitted, on September 12, in a farewell speech he gave at the finance ministry. Before several hundred guests, he anticipated the accusations that would soon be made against him. “But who would sincerely dare to say that this protective spending, for which some are now blaming us, after having begged us to spend more yesterday, did not respond to an economic case of force majeure?” he said, with a hint of bitterness.
Gloomy predictions
Since coming out of the Covid-19 crisis, the former finance minister has tried to embody a serious budgetary approach. Did he not, for example, announce, as early as August 25, 2021, the end of the government’s “whatever it costs” policy? At the time, even within the government, this was an unthinkable rhetorical position. A few weeks later, then-prime minister Jean Castex granted French people earning less than €2,000 net per month an “inflation allowance” of €100 per month, and froze the price of gas. In April 2022, a few days before the first round of the presidential election, Castex unveiled a “fuel rebate” of 15 cents per liter for motorists, which would weigh heavily on the government’s finances (€7.5 billion in 2022).
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