2023-12-21 12:15:03
In front of an audience of several hundred scientists, on December 7, at the Elysée, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, was at ease, determined, and “in companionship” with the academic community, as he confessed. But it was less as a science enthusiast than as a magician that he actually behaved, glossing over what did not fit into his framework, multiplying sleight of hand tricks, pulling a few rabbits out of the hat, to end up with transforming the flattery addressed to his audience into scathing criticism.
To the point of “forgetting” the harshness of another famous speech, that of Nicolas Sarkozy in January 2009, who blurted out: “A French researcher publishes 30% to 50% less than a British researcher. (…) Obviously, if you don’t want to see that, thank you for coming, there is light, it’s heated…”
First classic magic trick, that of embellishing the balance sheet. Like a magic wand, his arrival in 2017 would have ended years of “massive disinvestment”. Except that this is not seen in the usual criterion of the share of GDP devoted to research and development (R&D), which has remained stable since the start of the first five-year term, at 2.2%. Estimates even indicate a drop to 2.18% for 2022.
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This is also not seen in the share of national publications in the global total, which he recalled has fallen, without saying that it continues to do so despite his efforts. Even the annexes to the finance bill for 2024 provide that this will continue. Worse, on the balance sheet side, taking into account inflation, the “magical” research programming law of 2020 actually gives fewer resources to laboratories next year.
With more “success”, the President of the Republic has literally made 7 billion euros disappear from the landscape. This is the envelope, which the State voluntarily deprives itself of each year, to support business research and development – the research tax credit – without macroeconomic results. The share of R&D expenditure by companies does not follow the progression of the research tax credit. But there is still no question of questioning the effectiveness of the system, absent from the speech, like that of the measures on innovation, on December 11 in Toulouse.
Promise simplification, get the opposite
Another classic speech ritual is to forget the previous ones. The head of state tried it twice on central themes of his argument: evaluation and simplification. In his 2023 speech, he regrets that in France “we still do not draw enough conclusions from the evaluations”when in November 2019, for the 80th anniversary of the CNRS, he criticized “a soft system without consequences”. Between these two highlights, he appointed his own research advisor, Thierry Coulhon, as head of the agency responsible for evaluations, who therefore did not succeed in “hardening” the evaluation, but was appointed head of the executive committee of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris.
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