This year, they will have been "a few days late", joked Gabriel Attal, Minister of the Budget, before the Senate, presenting the content of the stability program 2023-2027. In 2022, the government sent Brussels this mandatory document on its economic forecasts almost three months after the deadline. A little dunce on the form, the France wants to play the good student on the substance. In its copy, the Ministry of Finance promises the European institutions that, by the end of the five-year term, it will bring the public deficit below the very symbolic bar of 3% of GDP, to 2.7% precisely. On the debt side, the executive aims for a substantial reduction to 108.3% of GDP in 2027, against 111.6% today, a decrease of 3.3 points.
A commitment that succeeds in the tour de force of being both insufficient - the debt target set by Europe is 60% - and "not very credible", according to public finance expert François Ecalle. It doesn't matter...
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