The bosses welcome it: little has been said about companies in this campaign. Even the superprofits of Total, an ideal target in a context of soaring oil prices, have aroused relatively little reaction among political leaders. Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the president of Medef, admits it himself: “We are less attacked than in 2017, the company is less attacked. It was not she who served as a watershed line. » The ideological battles were less divisive than in the last two elections, he judges, citing the 75% tax on very high incomes of François Hollande in 2012 or the 500,000 cuts of civil servant posts by François Fillon in 2017 . A “middle way” would have emerged.
However, companies have, as in every election, taken care to defend their interests as closely as possible in recent months. The Medef and the Confederation of small and medium-sized enterprises, but also very large enterprises, united in the French Association of Private Enterprises (AFEP), a more discreet organization and less known to the general public, but very influential in the public sphere: all have played a role in the making and evolution of candidate programs in economic matters.
It was after a major lobbying effort that companies obtained the promise of a new reduction in production taxes. This set of taxes and contributions represents several tens of billions of euros, and the various taxes that make it up, higher in France than elsewhere in Europe, are described as penalizing for the industry, because they weigh on the figure. business, land or added value. A very powerful argument in the post-Covid context, which has put questions of industrial sovereignty back at the heart of the debate, even if the harmfulness of these taxes for industry is debated among economists. The current executive has already started to reduce them by 10 billion euros per year during the fall 2020 recovery plan.
Relay in Parliament
Five years ago, however, no candidate spoke of it, with the exception of François Fillon, who mentioned it in a somewhat vague way. The priority was to reduce corporate tax, supposed to meet a competitiveness objective – the rate has since been reduced from 33% to 25%. This year, on the right and on the far right, everyone has taken up the idea of lowering taxes on production, in various configurations.
This is also the case of Emmanuel Macron, while his program in 2017 did not mention it, who proposes in 2022 to abolish the contribution on the added value of companies (CVAE), one of the most criticized taxes. by companies and which brings in 7 billion euros per year. “It is curious to have retained the CVAE, because it does not target industry more specifically than other taxes on productioncomments the economist Clément Malgouyres. It is a tax which has been little evaluated, but which, a priori, has little impact on the behavior of companies”. His work for the Institute for Public Policy show that all sectors pay the CVAE, including services, banks and insurance, and that small businesses are essentially exempt since it is only due from 500,000 euros of turnover business and that its rate is progressive.
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