The senior official was shocked. The last time Thierry Aulagnon headed the office of a Minister of the Economy was in the early 1990s. Returning to Bercy in 2016, after almost thirty years in the private sector, he was amazed to see how the state had changed. As if, in terms of economic policy, the latter had organized his own impotence. “I had the feeling that the action of the State had become much more difficult”he summarizes.
In his astonishment report: European constraints that did not exist thirty years earlier, neither on the budget nor on the debt nor on industrial policy (through the Brussels state aid regime). “There were other difficulties, such as hyperinflation or feverish exchange rates, but no European constraints”, he notes. The Constitutional Council then, which became “much more present than thirty years ago”, with around a hundred decisions per year, a large part of which are in the economic and financial field through priority questions of constitutionality. Decisions “unpredictable and which sometimes intervene very long after the rule of law has been laid down, in taxation for example”he continues. Finally, the proliferation of independent authorities (the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties, for example). “There are hundreds of them, sometimes in areas that I did not suspect. We can clearly see the underlying logic. But the result is that executive action is hampered. »
In fact, in thirty years, the panoply of economic policy instruments available to the State has been considerably reduced. The economy was liberalized in two successive waves, first in the 1980s – price and exchange controls were abandoned, state-subsidized loans abolished, public enterprises privatised. Then, in a more recent period, under the impetus of Brussels, which placed the consumer at the heart of the European project with an offensive competition policy, the restriction of State aid and, indirectly, industrial policy. The European Commission has also advocated – with relative success – for greater budgetary orthodoxy with the single currency and the Maastricht Treaty, which also transferred monetary policy to a European Central Bank independent of political power, while the Bank of France was not until 1993.
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