Dpoorly maintained railway tracks. Trains running slower, the ballast not supporting higher speeds. Parisian transport on the verge of asphyxiation, especially buses where waiting times become interminable due to the dilapidated state of the equipment and especially the lack of drivers. Half of the nuclear power plants shut down during the summer of 2022 for maintenance faults. Not to mention the creation from scratch of competitors to EDF, a pricing not linked to the average production cost of the electricity produced in France, but to the marginal cost of the electron on the European market – a “aberration”according to the Minister of Energy Transition herself.
Insufficient stock of masks, reduction in the number of hospital beds, discouragement of nurses and doctors from practicing their profession: the desire to “control” health expenditure has also imposed low reimbursement prices for old drugs, which pushed the laboratories to relocate these unprofitable productions to Asia, leading for example to the disappearance of the last French paracetamol production workshop in 2008.
In the so-called sovereign domains (justice, police, education, armies), the situation is hardly better than in the public services. While the Ministry of Justice has benefited from a sharply increased budget since 2020, the situation of the courts and even more so that of prisons remains worrying. In 2019, the average time to obtain a court decision was 6.2 months before the magistrate, 9.4 months before the tribunal de grande instance, 14.5 months before the industrial tribunal, 14 months before the Court of Appeal. Proceedings spanning almost a decade between the first instance and the cassation are not uncommon. France is regularly condemned for not respecting the ” reasonable delay “ by the European Court of Human Rights. By the Chancellery’s own admission, French justice is “dilapidated”.
Accounting logic
According to the International Prison Observatory, prison overcrowding is a chronic French evil. In 1990, the prison occupancy rate was 124%. It has since fallen but remains high, at 118%, with 71,669 prisoners for 60,715 places on the 1er September 2022.
In education, according to the SNES-FSU union, 7,900 teaching jobs would have been cut in college and high school during Emmanuel Macron’s previous five-year term. As for the universities, some establishments suffered for several years from a drop in the endowment per student; their situation is now even more critical due to the increase in energy expenditure.
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