This is the unmissable event at the start of the year for the institution on rue Cambon, in Paris. But, less than two months before the presidential election, the annual report of the Court of Auditors is of particular importance. For the magistrates, the tricolor trajectory of budgetary recovery advocated by the executive and the majority at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic is, in fact, “uncertain”, they judge in the first part of the report, centered, as usual, on the situation of public finances. Criticism is not new, for an institution traditionally guarantor of budgetary orthodoxy. However, it sounds like a warning addressed to the current government, at a time when Emmanuel Macron’s declaration of candidacy and, therefore, a detailed program for a hypothetical second five-year term are pending.
In the meantime, it is indeed the forecasts of the last budget and the elements given at the beginning of the year by Bercy – on which the government is planning – which act as a compass for the Court. Namely a public deficit reduced from 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 to 3% in 2027, the date on which the public debt (expected at 113.5% of GDP this year) would begin to decrease slightly.
Such objectives, which today allow the executive to boast of its budgetary seriousness, would be based ” exclusively on cost control”, regret however the report. Enough to leave the Court circumspect. The magistrates calculated that such an objective “would require more than 9 billion additional savings each year compared to the growth in expenditure observed before the crisis (2010-2019), a period during which savings had already been made”. A hollow criticism of the government’s economic voluntarism for the years to come.
Because several hazards remain to achieve this. Even if post-crisis economic activity has exceeded its 2019 level since autumn 2021 – growth is expected at 4% this year; the deficit should be reduced to 7% – and tax revenues should remain dynamic, the executive did not skimp on tax cuts and levies at the end of the five-year period: 15.5 billion in 2021 (tax cut production for companies, continued reduction in the corporate tax rate and housing tax) and another 10.1 billion expected in 2022 (continuation of previous reductions, to which the tariff shield has been added against soaring gas and electricity prices).
You have 60.91% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.