Pierre Moscovici, first president of the Court of Auditors, October 16, 2024 in Toulouse (AFP / Lionel BONAVENTURE)
The censorship of the Barnier government “is not chaos” but we must avoid “a progressive loss of credibility” of France due in particular to a “too large debt”, estimated Sunday the first president of the Court of Auditors , Pierre Moscovici, on LCI.
Censorship “is neither a catastrophe nor something trivial. (…) The markets did not tremble, the + spread + (rate gap, NLDR) rather decreased a little bit with Germany Our credit is monitored, it is undoubtedly damaged, we say that France has entered a phase of political uncertainty, we are waiting for answers but without shuddering, without saying that the country has fallen”, summarized. Mr. Moscovici.
“It is not chaos and it will not be chaos, what I fear much more is a form of depression,” he emphasized.
“We are not threatened by a Greek situation, on the other hand we must be extremely vigilant about what threatens us”, underlined Pierre Moscovici, highlighting “too large a debt which prevents us from acting” and “a progressive loss of credibility, as if we were slowly sinking, as if we were falling off the radar.”
Michel Barnier's government had set itself the objective of reducing the public deficit to 5% of GDP next year. The deficit is expected at 6.1% of GDP in 2024, compared to 4.4% initially forecast.
The first president of the Court of Auditors believes that “the objective of the next government must be to significantly reduce the deficit and move towards 5%”, in particular to have “the capacity to act in the future”.
“We are not going to have a budget right away, to ensure that we avoid the +shutdown+, we are going to pass a special law which will be extremely narrow and reduced, and which will allow the continuity of current public services. Then, it It will be necessary to vote on a budget which will go towards the 5% public deficit, estimated Mr. Moscovici.
“No one could say what the deficit would be if we were content with the special law, but probably it would be around 6%, a little less than 6%,” he continued.
“I don't have the feeling that we are in a recession phase” even if “it is certain that today the slope is a little more severe”, he also indicated, when asked about the comments from the president of Medef, Patrick Martin, who “thinks” that France has “already entered into a slight recession”.
