France's deficit: Bruno Le Maire recognizes “a serious technical error in evaluation”

The government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, faced with the deterioration of public finances, unveiled last month a draft finance law (PLF) for 2025.

It provides for significant savings and tax increases, with the aim of reducing France's public deficit, which should amount to 6.1% in 2024, to 5% of GDP in 2025.

“When I am told that the deficit for 2024 will be 6.1%, it is the choice of the current governmentL. We could have in 2024, with more vigorous recovery measures, a deficit of around 5.5%,” Bruno Le Maire said during a hearing on the deterioration of public finances before the Senate Finance Committee.

“Neither fault nor cover-up”

The former minister formally contests the public deficit forecast put forward in September by Michel Barnier's government for this year. “It is the result of his choice, and his only choice, not to take over all of our recovery measures,” he said, citing in particular revenue measures on energy rents and share buybacks.

He also said that other measures proposed in the past, including a lower increase in social benefits and pensions in August 2023, were not followed during the final arbitrations.

The former head of Bercy, in office from 2017 to last September, also assured that there had been no “neither fault, nor dissimulation, nor desire to deceive“, more “a serious technical error in the evaluation of revenue for which we are paying the price and to which I responded with the most total determination and the most total transparency.”

According to Bruno Le Maire, the health crisis linked to COVID-19 and the inflationary crisis which followed, particularly after the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, are however the main causes of the budgetary slippage. They “have profoundly disrupted all macroeconomic indicators, all revenue indicators in France, Germany, as in other European countries.he declared.