What is the economic balance sheet of Macron’s five-year term? To talk about it, we received on our set Philippe Murer, an economist who presents himself as a Gaullist and a sovereignist. While the Minister of the Economy Bruno le Maire claimed in December 2021 the success of a management that would have brought France back to the time of the Glorious Thirties, Philippe Murer denounces here a falsification: “Macron’s economic balance sheet is calamitous, but it is made up like a stolen car”.
Philippe Murer begins this “Essential interview” by dismantling the myth according to which “the economic management of Emmanuel Macron’s government is the return of the post-war boom period”: “In fact, Emmanuel Macron has grown by 0.5% per year. So it’s very, very far from the Trente Glorieuses with growth of 4 or 5% per year. We have extremely weak growth,” explains the economist, who believes that France is, in fact, heading towards third-worldization.
How is it then that Emmanuel Macron’s economic record is presented as a success in the press? For Philippe Murer, it’s simple: the government… is lying. In support of this assertion, the Swedish balance sheet: “Growth is much weaker than that of Sweden. Macron therefore burned 640 billion in debt to have 0% growth. This is proof, according to him, that the argument that the health crisis is responsible for this weak growth does not hold. “Sweden has fewer deaths than France, growth similar to ours and no increase in public debt. It is therefore the management of the Covid which has been very bad, not the health crisis itself ”, asserts the economist.
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Philippe Murer also curbs the assertion that the president-candidate has managed to put an end to the deindustrialization of France. “When we look at Eurostat figures, we see that France has lost 5% of its industrial production”. And to denounce: “Macron falsifies, imagining that there are no serious economists who are going to look for the figures which are just in the public databases of Eurostat. »
Recalling that this pursuit of deindustrialisation is also reflected in the increase in the trade deficit, the economist insists on the fact that the key to prosperity lies in industry: “Countries which have industry are the richest. This is where there are high wages and significant productivity gains. And the wealth created by the industry is then diffused into society. A hairdresser in France is paid less than a hairdresser in Switzerland. It is thanks to Swiss industry that hairdressers in Switzerland are better paid. »
Another consequence of this deindustrialization: the uberization of society, which is observed by the increase in the number of “odd jobs”. “A key element of Macron’s five-year term is that we have gone from 1.1 million autoentrepreneurs to 2.2 million. We therefore doubled the number of auto-entrepreneurs. These are people who have really low wages and who have the disadvantages of the entrepreneur and the disadvantages of the employee. It’s the worst of all worlds, ”laments Mr. Murer, who maintains that it is” that which allowed Macron to believe that he had created lots of jobs and that unemployment was disappearing. In addition, he reveals some tricks used by the government to artificially lower the unemployment curve. For example, 400,000 French people would still be on partial unemployment without being counted among job seekers.
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Despite the praise heard for Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term, reality ends up catching up with the story, as our guest explains: “There are still incredible polls: 20% of people skip a meal a day and a third of people give up treatment because they don’t have enough money at the end of the month. That’s what the Yellow Vests who took to the streets said. And [la paupérisation] continues: in 2021, people have had salary increases that are well below inflation”.
The opportunity for him to also attack a flagship measure of the program of the president-candidate: the postponement of the retirement age to 65 years. According to him, “there is absolutely no need to carry out this pension reform”. To demonstrate his point of view, several arguments. First of all, according to an Ifop poll for the JDD, “77% of French people are opposed to it”. Then, the very low pension budget deficit: 2.5 billion, with 2.5 billion budget surplus in the supplementary pension scheme. “So we are generally in balance. And there are 150 billion euros of reserve in the pension reserve fund, ”he underlines. Moreover, “at 62, half of French people arrive unemployed. So how can we ask them to go until 65? “, asks the economist, before pointing the finger at a contradiction of the executive:” When we have spent 650 billion euros of debt for an absurd management of the Covid, how can we say that it is absolutely necessary to reform the pension system to save a few billion? »
The sovereigntist also warns of the brain drain abroad, the damage of inflation, and the decline in purchasing power which will be accompanied by a recession, since households will not be able to consume , lack of money. “This is not a permanent situation”, warns Philippe Murer.