A few months before the presidential election, and a few hours after the publication of a note from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) urging France to better manage its public spending, the vote by the National Assembly, Thursday, November 18, came at the right time. Barring a dramatic turn of events, the proposed organic law “relating to the modernization of public finance management” should be approved identically by the Senate during the week of November 22. What is it about ? In the boxes for more than three years, put away due to the pandemic and then back on the agenda in the spring, before being the subject of a showdown with the senators on the calendar, the text constitutes nothing less one “Mini-revolution”, according to Laurent Saint-Martin, the rapporteur (La République en Marche) of the budget, behind the project with the president (Les Républicains) of the Assembly’s finance committee, Eric Woerth.
Twenty years after the promulgation of the organic law relating to finance laws (LOLF), which in 2001 modernized and simplified the presentation of the budget, this text of 14 articles aims to better frame and steer public spending. It is widely supported by Bercy, to the point that the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, had repeatedly spoken in favor of its main measure: a “standard” of multi-year spending. “I’m proposing a rule that would set a maximum amount of spending over five years, he said this summer. We need to make clear choices about which ones we favor, and which ones we give up. “
A message for voters
Concretely, the text provides that from 2022, the budgets presented each year, such as the public finance programming laws (multiannual projections) include a “Objective of change in volume and (…) in billions of euros current expenditure ”. A message for voters, especially on the right, but also for the European Commission: the stability program sent to Brussels in April, which lists the government’s reform plans, this year mentioned the need to improve “Governance of public finances” in order to better control its evolution. So far, only the overall volume of expenditure in points of gross domestic product (GDP) was included in the budget documents.
The executive will also have to detail the main public expenditure considered as investment expenditure, that is to say “Taking into account their contribution to the potential growth of the GDP, to the structural transformation of the country and to its long-term social and environmental development”. A broad formulation, but which has the merit of including in the law a recurrent debate since the health crisis, but also because of the investments necessary for the climate transition.
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