2023-05-04 07:33:42
Linflation has become the number one concern of the French. The hope that the phenomenon is temporary has faded. The rise in prices settles in the daily life of the population. The slight slowdown in March gave way to a new rebound in April, to 5.9% over one year. On food products, the rate even flirts with 15%.
As often in France, all eyes are on the state. The government has multiplied initiatives to try to “protect the French”. The arsenal deployed ranges from fuel vouchers to price shields for gas and electricity, including a « trimestre anti-inflation »encouraging distributors to offer products at affordable prices and whose principle is extended beyond June 15, as announced on Wednesday May 3 by the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire.
But, at the same time, these measures are relayed by mobilization at the local and associative level. “Purchasing power houses” are emerging, offering bundled offers to obtain preferential rates. Communities are increasing the amount of emergency housing aid, distributing solidarity vouchers intended for basic necessities or lowering the price of public transport. HLM organizations renounce to apply the legal increase in rents, others offer support schemes for the payment of charges.
Some Restos du Coeur are setting up itinerant centers, while more and more beneficiaries can no longer afford to pay for their fuel to go to the usual premises, located far from their homes. Sometimes, cooking workshops are organized for students in addition to food aid to combine solidarity, savings, conviviality and better food. Elsewhere, theaters offer “solidarity tickets” to poor people, financed by other spectators, while Facebook groups are transformed into barter sites to exchange objects or foodstuffs.
These examples are so many comforting signals regarding the ability of civil society, associations and local authorities to organize themselves and take initiatives in addition to those of the State. The latter cannot be the systematic and unique answer to everyone’s problems. It is not sustainable over time in budgetary terms and it is not optimal in terms of efficiency. In parallel with national systems that are not always sufficiently targeted, these actions make it possible to do more tailor-made, according to local specificities and individual situations.
Some initiatives manage to thwart the threshold effects below which the usual aid is triggered, by focusing in particular on a notion that is still too little taken into account: the “rest to live”, that is to say, once deducted constrained expenses (energy, housing, transport, etc.). The notion, more suitable than that of income, makes it possible to support these middle classes who earn too much to receive aid (indexed to inflation), but not enough to ensure the end of the month.
Far from the image of an apathetic France, these initiatives are encouraging: society knows how to show solidarity, reactivity and innovation. The efforts are all the more meritorious in that the associations, communities and individuals who are behind them are themselves suffering the deleterious effects of inflation.
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