How did France go from the public deficit of 4.4% initially planned for the end of 2024 to the 6.1% finally planned in one year? Or a drift of 50 billion euros, unprecedented outside a period of crisis? Was the 2024 budget fake? Why were the figures announcing this spectacular decline not published until after the legislative elections? Did the previous government hide the truth from Parliament and the French? So many questions that the commission of inquiry into the “drifts on public finances” launched on Wednesday, October 16 in the National Assembly. A transpartisan body that the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, has “tell the truth to the French”.
Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy from May 2017 to September 2024, is at the center of the enigma. “Naturally I stay with [la] total layout » of the investigation commission, the former minister wrote about X on Wednesday: “I will answer all your questions with complete transparency. » Calendar coincidence or not, the man who now teaches economics and geopolitics courses at a university establishment in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is subject to a media diet, invited, on Tuesday, a dozen deputies to lunch at a gastronomic restaurant located one step away from the Bourbon Palace. A table in front of which the former number two of the government said ” happy ” with the perspective of “to be able to establish the responsibility of each person” before the parliamentarians of the investigation commission, reports a guest.
Because Bruno Le Maire does not intend to carry the heavy weight of this unprecedented slip alone. “We spend a lot”admitted on September 12 in Bercy, while saying goodbye before several hundred guests, anticipating the trial that was going to take place against him. “But who would dare to honestly say that these protection expenses that some now reproach us for, after having asked us yesterday to spend more, did not respond to an economic case of force majeure? »he said, with a touch of bitterness.
Pessimistic Treasury forecasts
Since the end of the Covid-19 crisis, the former Economy Minister has tried to embody budgetary seriousness. Didn’t you announce, as of August 25, 2021, the “End of whatever is necessary”? A speech that was inaudible at the time, even within the government. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Jean Castex granted “inflation compensation” of 100 euros per month to French people who earn less than 2,000 euros net per month, and blocked the price of gas. In April 2022, a few days before the first round of the presidential elections, Matignon’s tenant took out a “fuel discount” of 18 cents per liter to motorists, which will weigh heavily on public finances (7.5 billion euros in 2022).
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