“France is not bankrupt”, tempers Moscovici

“France is not bankrupt”, despite a public deficit which will clearly exceed 4.9% of GDP initially planned for 2023, said this Friday Pierre Moscovici on RMC/BFM TV.

“France is a safe country, a very open country and therefore it is a country whose debt is in a good position, it finds people to finance it,” declared the first president of the Court of Auditors the day after a senatorial control at the Ministry of Finance which revealed that the government envisaged a slippage of the deficit to 5.6% of GDP in 2023. “There is no problem of debt sustainability,” he added.

“On the other hand, we have a very worrying public finance situation and it is a credibility problem for us, particularly within the euro zone,” continued the former Minister of the Economy and Finance. “We cannot stay in this situation. »

Soaring public deficit

The government has drawn up a deficit trajectory “until 2027, which should take us below 3% of GDP,” Pierre Moscovici recalled this Friday. Therefore, “there are efforts to be made to reduce our deficit and especially to reduce our public debt,” he concluded.

The official figure for France’s deficit in 2023, published by theINSEE, must be revealed Tuesday morning. During an inspection “on documents and on site” in Bercy, the general rapporteur of the Senate Finance Committee Jean-François Husson noted on Thursday that the government was counting on a surge in the public deficit to 5.6% of GDP in 2023, 5.7% in 2024 and 5.9% in 2025.

These figures should nevertheless be taken with “caution” because they were calculated before the announcement of a savings plan of 10 billion euros in 2024 in state spending. The government is also seeking to generate 20 billion additional savings in 2025, this time by having local authorities and social security administrations contribute to the effort.