The twelve zeros were narrowly avoided. But the tricolor public debt is close to the spectacular threshold of 3,000 billion euros. According to INSEE data published on Tuesday March 28, it remained contained at 2,950 billion euros at the end of 2022, or 111.6% of gross domestic product (GDP), down slightly from the third quarter. Thanks to a continuous rebound in tax revenues, boosted by inflation, the 2022 deficit comes out a little better than expected: 4.7% of GDP when the government was expecting 5%.
“The INSEE figures for the year 2022 confirm the good performance of French growth and therefore of our tax revenues, in particular corporate tax.reacted the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire. Our strategy remains the same: improve France’s growth to reduce debt and control our spending. »
Can a debt approaching the 3,000 billion euro mark cause alarm in a context of generalized addiction to debt? “In our November 2022 barometer, the reduction of public debt was among the last priorities of respondents, only ahead of the fight against Covid and the European Union”, notes Frédéric Dabi, managing director of the IFOP. The hundreds of billions of euros spent by the State in the face of the health crisis, then inflation, have “shown that you can live with debt”, summarizes the pollster. A sign, according to him, of this disinterest, “the macroeconomic argument did not carry over to justify the pension reform, whereas it was very present during the postponement of the age to 62 in 2010”.
Rating agencies not convinced
The indifference of public opinion and part of the political class for the subject nevertheless worries Bercy, which has seen interest rates flirt more and more often with 3% since the end of 2022, while France was borrowing still in negative territory a year earlier. The debt burden should approach 52 billion euros in 2023, up by more than 12 billion over one year, according to the 2023 finance bill, making it the second largest item of expenditure after national education.
“Our debt suffered a major shock with the 2008 crisis, then it continued to swell with the Covid crisis and the energy crisis, recalls Mathieu Plane, economist at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE). Between 2020 and 2023, 300 billion euros have been injected into the economy. The state has played the role of firefighter and shock absorber but at some point, the deficit trajectory will indeed be constrained. »
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