French Prime Minister Michel Barnier warned on Sunday that his country is “in a very serious situation”, With a public debt of more than three thousand billion euros, he said he did not rule out raising taxes on the rich and argued that the credibility of the markets must be guaranteed.
“I am not going to raise taxes even more for all the French people who already pay more taxes than all the other Europeans,” Barnier said in his first interview after announcing the composition of his government on Saturday, on French public television channel France 2. Thus, he added that I won’t download them “neither to the most modest, nor to people who work, nor to to the middle classes”but at the same time he indicated that he was not going to “exclude the richest from participating in the national effort that will have to be made.”
France is in a delicate financial situation, with a public deficit that last year amounted to 5.5% of the gross domestic product (GDP), while the budget forecast was 4.9%. In this sense, the Treasury has predicted that this year France will end 2024 with a deficit of 5.6%very far from the 3% limit recommended by European rules, and with a debt of 112%.
The new conservative prime minister said that with the majority of French debt being issued on international markets and in the hands of foreigners, “France’s credibility must be preserved”.
THE The European Commission has opened in July in France an excessive deficit procedure and the outgoing government had set itself the objective of reducing the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2027, but few considered this trajectory credible, starting with the governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy de Gallois, who was betting on a longer term.
Barnier now recalls that, as he said when he took office on September 5, does not want to “worsen fiscal or ecological debt”which means, according to him, that “a collective effort must be made to control public spending”, which implies making it more efficient and evaluating it.
