“I am at the head of a state which is in bankruptcy on the financial level” …
This twilight declaration is not the work of François Bayrou, but that of François Fillon who was thus expressed in September 2007, during a trip to Corsica.
Arrested by farmers on the island of beauty on their subsidies and fairly exasperated by the accumulation of complaints addressed to him, the Prime Minister takes this opportunity to shape his character as a serious and responsible presidential, but also to alert opinion to the accounts of France. With a deficit which then stood at 2.7 % of GDP and a cumulative debt rate of 63.8 %, it was however … The good old days.
At the time, the political class had not forgiven one of its own – guilty ten years later from the scandal of “PenelopeGate” – This trial in pervable budgetary unruly on the left and right alternately to business. So much so that for the past twenty years, the fourteen governments that have succeeded each other have continued to shave more or less freely and worsen the situation in general indifference, or almost.
With the exception of François Bayrou to whom we must recognize a certain consistency in the matter, there are few who, like him, dared to witness the French on our colossal debt and constantly alert on his serious dangers.
Become Prime Minister by the grace of a calamitous dissolution and the political instability which it caused, the Béarnais pierge of “Magic money” It therefore seems determined to move from the word of the triple unhappy candidate he was to the presidential election, to the acts authorized by his function as head of government.
But by what path to attack the “L’Himalaya”after having only been around, about the budget as well as everything else?
What the unusual proposal suggests to consult the French by referendum on the subject is that in spite of his long experience, François Bayrou, 73, does not know himself. The problem is not only that he has a majority or that he is the most unpopular Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic.
The real problem, as confirmed by the country’s debt level at 3,300 billion euros, is that France’s fiscal policy is no longer sustainable, and it risks being all the less than under the effect of the world conjuncture heckled by the war in Ukraine or the customs mess sown by Donald Trump, the expected growth will undoubtedly be there. Faced with the inevitable character of the plane of rigor or economies which is essential in the country, François Bayrou therefore calls for participatory democracy, with the hope of a popular ratification.
It takes the risk, in case of “non”to sanctuarize for some time, the blockages and the fiscal policy that precipitated France against the debt wall …
