The debate on the finance bill, which must find some 60 billion in savings in 2025 to absorb an abysmal deficit – 6.1% of GDP and 3,230 billion euros in debt – has given rise in recent weeks to multiple proposals, the deputies, in committees or in the hemicycle, pushing their ideas. A “Lépine competition” for taxes, denounced Prime Minister Miche Barnier. But a competition in which the deputies of the “common base” who support it also participate since it was the former Macronist minister Gérald Darmanin, who launched the idea of eliminating a public holiday to replenish the state coffers. An air of déjà vu that takes us back twenty years.
In 2004, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin established the “day of solidarity” by eliminating Pentecost Monday. A decision taken urgently after the deadly heatwave of 2003 which revealed the deficiencies in our system of care for the elderly. This day worked but not paid was to bring in 2.4 billion euros per year to the National Solidarity Fund for Autonomy (CNSA). The results are mixed since if the revenues are there, their use remains opaque and the question of financing dependency is still not resolved, due to lack of the old age law promised by Emmanuel Macron but never carried out.
Eliminating a second public holiday may seem like a simple and attractive idea, but it is based on several misunderstandings. First myth to deconstruct: the French are privileged when it comes to public holidays. The reality is more nuanced. With 11 legal public holidays, France is within the European average. Spain has 14, Italy 11, and Germany between 9 and 13 depending on the Länder. Only the United Kingdom is an exception with 8 “bank holidays”. A race to the bottom would therefore bring no comparative advantage.
Second preconceived idea: the French do not work enough. Productivity figures tell a completely different story: according to OECD data, in 2022, France ranked 6e ranks in terms of productivity in Europe, behind Ireland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. A performance, certainly impacted downward by the Covid crisis, but which demonstrates that the question is not so much the quantity of work as its organization and its efficiency.
The elimination of an additional public holiday therefore appears to be an easy solution which in no way resolves the structural problems of our public finances. It could even have perverse effects by demotivating employees, impacting domestic consumption, and causing social tensions. “The question is how we share budgetary efforts,” retorted CFDT general secretary Marlyse Léon.
Rather than asking employees to make an effort by working more, the government could have in its budget – it did so very timidly for only 5 million euros – seriously questioned the effectiveness of the costly exemptions from employer contributions granted since then. 2017 to businesses. Because given the level of public deficits, the idea of eliminating a second public holiday is, obviously, not only insufficient but it therefore appears more like a communication stunt, a smokescreen to avoid a real debate more directly. bottom.
