at the heart of the budgetary slippage of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term

How did France go in one year from the 4.4% public deficit initially planned for the end of 2024, to 6.1% finally expected? Or a drift of 50 billion euros, unprecedented outside of a crisis period? Was the 2024 budget disingenuous? Why were the figures announcing this spectacular decline only released after the legislative elections? Did the previous government hide the truth from Parliament and the French? So many questions that the commission of inquiry into the “drift in public finances” launched on Wednesday October 16 at the National Assembly. A transpartisan body on which the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, counts “tell the truth to the French”.

Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy from May 2017 to September 2024, is at the heart of the enigma. “I naturally stick to [la] total disposition » of the commission of inquiry, the former minister wrote on Wednesday about X: “I will answer all his questions with complete transparency. » Coincidence of the calendar or not, the man who now gives courses in economics and geopolitics in a university establishment in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is subject to a media diet, invited, on Tuesday, around ten deputies to lunch in a restaurant gastronomic restaurant located a stone’s throw from the Palais-Bourbon. A table in front of which the former number two in the government said ” happy ” with the prospect of “to be able to establish the responsibility of each person” in front of the parliamentarians of the commission of inquiry, reports a guest.

Because Bruno Le Maire does not intend to carry the heavy burden of this unprecedented slippage alone. “We spent a lot”he admitted on September 12 in Bercy, while he said goodbye in front of several hundred guests, anticipating the trial that was going to be done to him. “But who would dare say sincerely that these protection expenditures which some are now reproaching us for, after having begged us to spend more yesterday, did not respond to an economic case of force majeure? »he said, with a touch of bitterness.

Gloomy Treasury forecasts

Since the end of the Covid-19 crisis, the former Minister of the Economy has tried to embody budgetary seriousness. Did he not announce, as of August 25, 2021, the “end of whatever it takes”? A speech that was inaudible at the time, even within the government. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Jean Castex granted “inflation compensation” of 100 euros per month to French people earning less than 2,000 euros net monthly, and blocked the price of gas. In April 2022, a few days before the first round of the presidential election, the tenant of Matignon drew a “fuel discount” of 18 cents per liter to motorists, which will weigh heavily on state finances (7.5 billion euros in 2022).

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