The Court of Auditors has delivered its report on Public Finances: it does not believe in the government’s budget forecasts. The decryption of Fanny Guinochet.
The sanction has fallen: the Court of Auditors criticizes the government for being far too optimistic about its ability to bring our public accounts back into the green. If Bercy nevertheless bets on a deficit of 2.7% of GDP, at the end of the five-year term, but the institution of Pierre Moscovici estimates that we will be well above 3% of the GDP, of the gross domestic product, that is to say of our created wealth.
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Worse, the Court thinks that France will be the only country in Europe not to succeed in bringing this public deficit below this threshold in three years, when that Italy or Spain, which nevertheless have much less solid economies than ours, will succeed,as the government is already failing to meet its current commitments. So, according to her, it is lost in advance.
The consequences would be that France is put under surveillance by Brussels, whether it passes under a kind of tutelage of Europe. Before the Covid, countries whose deficit exceeded 3% were placed by Europe in a so-called excessive deficit procedure. This system was put on hold with the health crisis, because all countries have spent a lot, we remember it as the famous “whatever it takes”.
Bercy will have to find 60 billion euros by the end of the five-year term
But as of next year, the Commission is supposed to resume demanding budgetary rules. And if France is too bad a student, it could well be put on notice by Brussels. Which would be a very bad signal to our European partners, but also to our investors. Especially since it’s not as if it was only our deficit that was in the red: on the board, there is also a very high level of indebtedness, recalls the Court, with there too, a significant risk of slippage.
France must therefore make many more savings, this is what the Court recommends. PFor her, we must go far beyond the review of public expenditure, which Bruno the Mayor has put in place to see where we can cut in the budgets. The Minister of the Economy repeats that his objective is indeed to bring France back into the limelight by the end of the five-year term, but the Court urges him to go up a notch. Like astop dispersing by planning, for example, a two billion euro bicycle plan, a significant increase in military spending, an increase in student grants, etc. In short, she calls Bercy to review her copy and to find 60 billion euros in savings in total by the end of the five-year term.