“Beautiful slogan”, “primarily cosmetic support”, “insufficient budgetary translation”… While physical and sporting practice has been declared a major national cause in 2024 and the first developments of this initiative will be presented by the Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP), Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, Monday evening to the world sports and Tuesday, November 21 to local elected officials (during the Mayors’ Show in Paris), the senators never stopped, a few days earlier, to highlight the“huge gap between statements and reality” efforts implemented by the State in favor of sport.
In the wake of the rapporteur for opinion, Jean-Jacques Lozach (Socialist Party), the Committee on Culture, Education and Communication thus issued, on November 15, an opinion unfavorable to the adoption of the appropriations allocated to the sport in the finance bill for 2024.
The great national cause was notably one of the targets of senators, from almost all political sides. In their eyes, this operation risks having very little tangible effect on daily sporting practice. “Half of the credits will be allocated to communication actions. This will be insufficient to allow French people, increasingly affected by a sedentary lifestyle, to return to the path of sporting practice. deplores Senator Claude Kern (Centrist Union).
The government plans to devote 5.5 million euros to a communication campaign, to the labeling of projects and events, or to the mobilization of elected officials, the sports movement, businesses… To this sum will be added 5 million for financing projects and events around sport.
“A long-term vision is necessary”
More broadly, it is “the gap with the ambition to build a sporting nation”, displayed since 2022 by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, pointed out by the senators. As proof, they point to the weakness of the means allocated to sport by the State (0.18% of the total budget) and their evolution.
For 2024, “the sports program [hors JOP] increases by 8% [à 889 millions d’euros], which represents an additional 60 million euros. But it includes 51 million expenses directly linked to the Olympic Games and therefore non-renewable”underlines Jean-Jacques Lozach, who, like Michel Savin (Les Républicains), evokes a budget ” trompe l’oeil “.
It is not the trajectory of public finances until 2027 that is likely to reassure senators. “The question of the legacy of the JOPs will arise from mid-2024, then in 2025”, argues Mathilde Ollivier (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts). Amélie Oudéa-Castéra confirmed that payment credits allocated to sports practice will drop by 130 million euros in 2025 and 2026. Despite everything, the minister highlighted the stability of payment authorizations and declared that she had the assurance of ‘“an absence of dropout”.
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