Word “savings” is pronounced no less than ten times. In an interview given to Echosin February 2017, the candidate Emmanuel Macron unveiled an ambitious trajectory for the recovery of public finances which is already part of a “new growth model”.
“The weight of public spending will have to be gradually brought back towards the euro zone average, explained the one who was still Minister of the Economy six months earlier. I therefore foresee a drop of three points in the share of expenditure in national wealth. This represents 60 billion savings compared to the trend. » And to roll out its objectives: in addition to the tens of billions of savings on an annual basis, public spending reduced to below 52% of GDP in 2022, a public deficit reduced to 0.5% of GDP, and 120,000 job cuts in public service.
At a time when the Head of State has just formalized his candidacy for a second term, and evokes in a “letter to the French” the main lines of his economic project – ” We will have to work more and continue to lower taxes on labor and production” – the picture is significantly different.
Even without taking into account the Covid-19, which forced the government to open wide the budgetary floodgates, the weight loss cure announced was not as drastic as expected. Excluding emergency and recovery expenditure linked to the health crisis, and excluding the debt burden, the level of public expenditure is 60 billion euros higher over five years than what was planned in the public finance programming law. for the period 2018-2022, an increase of 5%, peak Senate Finance Committee report on the 2022 draft budget.
“The same story every time”
Adopted in the fall of 2017, the public finance programming law, which sets the budget trajectory over five years, provided for a rate of reduction in the public deficit of 0.3 points per year on average. But the executive quickly diverged.
After saving measures in 2018 and 2019, in particular on housing (2.5 billion euros in savings on the reform of housing aid) and on work (nearly 3 billion from the reduction in the number of subsidized contracts), he had to mobilize large sums to deal with the “yellow vests” crisis (regarding fifteen billion euros in bonuses, revaluations and tax cuts in 2020), and give up his growth objectives , debt reduction, green taxation and deficit reduction. “Until 2019, the objectives of the programming law were respected, and France emerged from the excessive deficit procedure in 2018”, recalls the budget ministry.
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