The clarification that the President of the Republic wished to bring to our political life, with the help of dissolution, will have caused the greatest confusion of the Fifth Republic. In doing so, it is also possible that it turns against its initiator. The motives which governed his decision in June, as improbable as it was shattering, could in fact be revealed at the moment when a budgetary debate with unpredictable consequences begins.
For many observers, the presidential initiative remains an enigma which finds its roots in the psyche of the head of state. There are probably psychological elements, like any human act, in the presidential decision of last June, but even more it is the weight of the circumstances on the deep nature of Emmanuel Macron which could explain the coup. institutional poker in which he projected the country.
The state of public finances will undoubtedly have an impact. It will have been all the more significant as the genealogy of the budgetary trajectory was clearly known at the highest level of the State, the Treasury management having warned on several occasions of the loss of control of our public accounts. The coming budgetary storm probably precipitated the dissolution, just to reshuffle the cards politically and avoid a probable motion of censure in the fall.
Did the dissolution take place against a backdrop of concealment of budgetary figures?
Was the maneuver carried out against a backdrop of more or less concealment of the budgetary figures, particularly for the national representation? The question obviously arises and if this were the case, to the management fault would be added an institutional and moral fault of a completely different gravity. We would therefore be in the presence of a State problem, the chain of responsibility of which would go back organically to the institutional chain of command of our regime.
It is in this context as troubled as it is disturbing that the debate opens in the National Assembly on a finance bill, each of which measures that hastily constructed, its first objective is to send signals to the European partners, the Commission and also the financial markets. The Prime Minister has no other option than to demonstrate to this informal grand jury that France has finally regained control of this debt that the Macronist exercise of power will have allowed to slip out of its bed.
The rest after this ad
However, the urgency, quite understandable, has its limits. And it cannot manage to rule out contradictions that the exercise of truth to which the brand new Prime Minister strives to conform cannot completely dissipate. Starting with the distribution of the burden between the fiscal lever on the one hand and the reduction of expenditure on the other, which remains mainly, according to the opinion of the High Council of Public Finances, carried by the first to the detriment of the second, contrary to government communication on the subject.
First question: if there is a duty to tell the truth, should the Prime Minister not break with the omissions which accompanied the most recent budgetary exercises and state the reality – that, due to lack of time, he cannot Is there a priority other tool than the fiscal tool to put our public finances back on a minimally virtuous path?
At the same time, is it not appropriate to stop always resorting to these same communication artifacts, when it comes to presenting another reality, that of the effort on expenditure, which in no way corresponds to a reduction, but to a deceleration of the increase? All these facilities do not necessarily augur a return to the promised truth when it comes to telling the facts and nothing but the facts on the state of the nation’s accounts burdened by the impecunious management of the various governments of the Macron presidency.
And “to govern is to choose” to use the formula of Pierre Mendès France, it is also and perhaps above all making the choice to assume responsibility for one’s actions without pretense, especially when one inherits a legacy, itself the object of greatest suspicions as to the lack of transparency which accompanied its dysfunctional gestation… Because while imbued with the eternal “plane technique” which proceeded to the establishment of the finance bill, the choices made in the latter above all speak of mediocrity of Bercy engineering, incapable of thinking outside of the levy software, and which it is feared will have negative effects both on economic activity and indirectly on the purchasing power of the working and middle classes .
No doubt the Prime Minister did not have the means to present a more daring copy
No doubt the Prime Minister, constrained by a situation for which he cannot be held responsible, did not have the means or the latitude in terms of agenda to present a more daring copy, but it was still better to do so. say, without appearing to maintain a story that hinders the credibility of public speech already strongly demonetized by a seven-year period of erratic expressions…
All this can ultimately only complicate the adoption of a budget of which nothing guarantees at this stage that it will be able to pass the ramp of national representation, or it should be remembered, the oppositions have never been also dominant and where this domination will not fail to be opposed if, over the course of the deliberations which begin, the proposed budgetary measures weigh too much on the French people to whom it would also appear that sincerity and transparency are being refused. The parliamentary part which begins will be tight and it already has the tense tone of a “double or nothing”…
*Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at the Sorbonne and author of “At the gates of power – RN, the inevitable victory? » (Michel Lafon).
