Bercy services envisage a slippage in the public deficit to 5.6% of GDP in 2023, 5.7% in 2024 and 5.9% in 2025, according to figures presented by the Budget rapporteur in the Senate, Jean-François Husson , who led a control mission to the Ministry of the Economy on Thursday.
Senator Les Républicains denounced disastrous budgetary management and the government’s withholding of information on these figures, which nevertheless, according to him, are a technical forecast to be taken with caution.
He specified that these figures came from documents dating from February, a date before the announcement of a saving of 10 billion euros for 2024 made by the Minister of Finance Bruno Le Maire. But the differential is out of all proportion to recent government announcements, he added.
The general rapporteur castigated the disastrous budgetary management of the government which today proves incapable of following the budgetary trajectory that it itself had adopted, calling for a collective start to put France back on the right track.
In its financial programming, France has so far forecast a deficit of 4.9% of GDP in 2023, 4.4% in 2024 and 3.7% in 2025.
Worse, according to Mr. Husson, the government was alerted in December about the spiraling deficit for the year 2023, then envisaged at 5.2% of GDP on that date, in full examination of the finance bill in Parliament. It took a quarter for the government to come out of the woods, said Senator LR.
In the afternoon, the general budget rapporteur exercised his powers of control over the government’s action, initiating an on-the-spot audit – a prerogative of Parliament’s standing committees and commissions of inquiry.
The results of this control are telling since the budgetary situation is in fact worse than what we imagined, he concluded, five days after the publication by INSEE of the official figure of the public deficit for the year 2023 .