The death of Georges Pompidou, fifty years ago, is an opportunity to remind us: public finances have never been in balance since 1974. A half-century of deficits whose scale has never ceased to get worse. Worse and worse. Thus the results of recent years, and in particular the unforeseen slippage to 5.5% of GDP in 2023, are incommensurate with the levels reached during the first seven-year term of François Mitterrand, where the annual imbalance had not exceeded 3.2%. And under the reign of Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée, the deficit was 4.9% per year on average, much higher than the previous ten years, which were already inglorious (4.5%).
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How can we understand this accelerated drift leading to a doubling of public debt since 2009? Three phenomena have combined: the succession of obviously exceptional crises, but also the borrowing facilities which constitute a real incentive to commit debt, and, last but not least, impatience...
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