The newly appointed Minister of Health, Aurélien Rousseau, plans to increase taxes on alcohol for preventive purposes from August 2023. “You can’t do this to me!” »responds Thomas Cazenave, his colleague responsible for public accounts. He considers it a personal matter: it is not about offending the winegrowers, particularly those on his electoral lands in Bordeaux.
Matignon arbitrates in favor of the latter, and the Government, which is working on the next Social Security budget, is accused by prevention associations of giving in to the pressures of some 59,000 French wine farms. A sector whose turnover the Ministry of Agriculture estimates at 15,000 million euros in 2022.
Neither the effects on health nor the delicate budgetary situation have so far called into question the tax advantage of wine over other alcohols. A situation that is partly explained by the presence of allies of the vine in all political fields and in all bodies of power. Health ministers follow one another, powerless on this issue that is unlike any other. “I am not in favor of increasing taxes on wine, there are other public health levers”assumes today with the World Thomas Cazenave was once again a simple (renaissance) deputy for the Gironde in September.
Precisely to protect the wine sector, the State has been reluctant for years to intensify the fight against the harmful effects of alcohol, responsible, according to the Ministry of Health, for 49,000 deaths a year. A position shared by the Elysée, where Emmanuel Macron himself claimed to drink wine “lunch and night” and refused to “annoy the French” with overly ambitious prevention campaigns.
During the first five years, the President of the Republic appointed Audrey Bourrolleau, former head of the Vin et société association, France’s main wine lobby, as his agricultural advisor, allowing her to defend the interests of the sector from the palace. .
Questioned in January 2019 about a possible increase in taxes on alcohol, the then Minister of Agriculture, Didier Guillaume, allowed himself a very personal analysis of the issue on BFM-TV: “Wine is not an alcohol like any other”and we don’t have “I have never seen a young man who leaves a nightclub and is drunk because he drank Côtes-du-Rhône, Crozes-Hermitage. [ou] Burgundy, never.”
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