what risks do the various programs pose to public finances?

The programs of the different political parties have been on display since Friday and they have one thing in common: they give pride of place to spending. Digging into debt also means finding investors to grant credit. At what price ?

It is normal when you are in a campaign to make attractive proposals to attract voters rather than promising blood and tears. But whether on the side of the New Popular Front alliance or on the side of the National Rally, these economic programs promise to be so generous that they are extremely costly.

We do not yet have precise figures, but we already have large amounts of sums advanced. On the side of the New Popular Front, between the return to retirement at 60, the indexation of pensions to salaries, the 10% increase in civil servants, the increase in the minimum wage to 1,600 euros net, there is something for everyone. hundreds of billions of euros. On the revenue side, to finance these promises, the new Popular Front is mainly counting on taxes: reestablishment of the ISF, the wealth tax, increase in inheritance taxes, increase in the CSG, etc. The equation does not seem completely balanced.

The National Rally also proposes numerous expenditures, such as removing taxes on fuel, lowering VAT on around a hundred essential products, nationalizing highways. There are also hundreds of billions of euros worth of money. To finance everything, the RN is counting on money coming in by fighting against fraud or by abolishing AME, state medical aid for immigrants, which will bring in more than a billion per year into the coffers. Here too, these measures risk not being enough and further widening the deficit.

On the Renaissance side, there are also expenses. Raising the tax-exempt bonus to 10,000 euros per year, systematically indexing retirement pensions to inflation will have a cost of the order of tens of billions of euros, are not neutral measures for public finances. Their bill, at least for the moment, nevertheless remains significantly lower than those present in the program of other formations, on the right as on the left.

The problem is that France does not have the means to finance all these programs. The country already lives largely on credit, with a debt that exceeds 110% of GDP. A debt held, as we recall, almost half by foreign investors, Americans, Japanese, Qataris, etc.

To finance all his promises, the winner – whoever he is – will be forced to borrow even more. It remains to be seen who will lend us, and above all at what level? As we saw during the week of June 10, rates are already starting to increase. Investors lend but more expensively. The risk is that, faced with so much future expenditure, they say to themselves that the project is not credible, that France will not be able to honor its debts. There is one certainty: the first consequences of these future elections promise to be a derailment of our public finances.