ALAIN’S SHARP OPINION – We have to face the facts: for power, there are billions of deficits and billions of deficits, and not all of them require decisions in absolute urgency.
Perhaps they do not have the same symbolic charge. And no doubt it is with politics as with medicine. If there is bad and good cholesterol on one side, there must be bad and good cholesterol on the other, and the bigger the better!
In recent weeks, one man has repeatedly intervened in the pension reform debate, but failed to capture the attention of the mainstream news media. This is Henri Guaino, successively planning commissioner, adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée, deputy of the nation. And this man made a speech very different from that of the leaders of the Republican right.
To sum up the argument of power and its supporters, the pension reform – which puts the country on fire and blood, when it is not in confinement due to blockages – aims to find 10 to 12 billion each year euros to save the pay-as-you-go pension scheme.
But, Henri Guaino underlines it in Le Figaro of March 27, no one was “able to say where the figures that served as justification for this project came from”, raising the legal retirement age from 62 to 64.
And he added: “It became clear that even the ministers didn’t know it when the Minister of Labor found nothing else to say to an MP: ‘I am not accountable to you for my figures'”.
Unacceptable remark, and strange motivation, indeed!
More fundamentally still, the former planning commissioner emphasizes that “the only somewhat serious data we have are those of the report of the Pensions Orientation Council”. Et “from his work, it does not appear anywhere that there is a risk of bankruptcy on the horizon”especially as “the share of pension expenditure in national income is expected to stabilize at worst and at best to decline in the decades to come”.
According to Henri Guaino, “if there is something to discuss today it is the level of salaries from which contributions are deducted and, in the future, the funding base, taking into account in particular the changes in work”.
When we read this, when we see the boiling state of the country in this month of April 2023, when we measure the risks linked to an infernal spiral, we want to write: “All that for that, stop!”. And we can’t resist referring to their balance sheets the meeting rulers who perform on the platforms and, now, in the most improbable magazines.
Because the figures do not plead in their favor, are of another dimension, without calling on their part the slightest serious action, while we are dancing on a volcano and we are at the mercy of a sudden rise in interest rates of interest.
In August 2022, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, peremptorily affirmed on a daily basis South West : “No one should doubt my determination to restore France’s public finances. To face other possible crises, we must rebuild our financial reserves”.
Nice program! A few weeks later, he presented a finance law for 2023 with 500 billion euros in expenditure for 345 billion in revenue, i.e. a deficit of 155 billion!
“Rebuilding our financial reserves” on such a basis will no doubt prove to be a complicated exercise. And it is not the situation of foreign trade which will facilitate a recovery of the accounts of the house of France, with a deficit of 164 billion euros in 2022, coming to sanction an insufficient national production, in industrial matters and even, now, in the agricultural field, our country being forced to import food products, a shame given the status of a great agricultural power which has been, and which should still be, ours.
On another level, justifying the pension reform by making the French people feel guilty on the grounds that current generations would be living on the backs of future generations, to whom they will bequeath their debts, is unbearable discourse if one considers that, directly or indirectly by far, Mr. Macron was associated with the 340 billion additional public debt of the Hollande five-year term, and is at the origin of the 600 billion which came to be added to it during his first mandate.
When we have attached our name to around a third of France’s 3,000 billion public debt, and we have shown ourselves incapable of reducing public spending for so many years, we refrain from giving the lesson and we have the right – what am I saying? – the duty to show a little more modesty and a lot less arrogance.
To restore harmony in the country, Mr. Macron would be well advised to rely on universal suffrage, and the sooner the better. He has the choice between a referendum of Article 11 of the Constitution and a dissolution of the National Assembly, two tools intended to allow the President of the Republic to resort to the arbitration of the sovereign people.
In either case, the President of the Republic must engage his responsibility before the people. It is one of the key pieces of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. In case of disavowal, he must resign. This is De Gaulle’s case law on the evening of the referendum of April 27, 1969, where he won 47.6% of the votes cast.