Political leaders are inside their function when they explain that the country situation is improving thanks to their action and that they take the appropriate measures in order to more progressing. Unfortunately, they don’t convince public opinion if we refer to polls and the figures do not show they are right. The State and the public organisms have never spent so much but we see a continuous degradation of the public services. For ten years, priority has been given to the recovery of the competitiveness and to the re-industrialization but the foreign trade deficit does not stop to increase. Full employment is the objective but France has more than three million jobseekers. At last, France had at its disposal a competitive power production tool which protected consumers and enterprises and gave an advantage against its European competitors. The energetic crisis in Europe after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has shown that this protection has disappeared.
The public services quality, in energy, transports and health had for a long time constituted one of the France strengths. Several decisions, among them the suppression of the special regimes have leaded to their degradation. They had been put into place to hire permanently available and qualified workforces without that the wage levels correspond to these exceptional working conditions. Transportation, electricity and natural gas gratuity given to the employees cost nothing to the enterprises compared to the savings made regarding wages. It was, with working time and shorter carrier durations, an essential factor of attractiveness. These enterprises now are facing hiring difficulties. Who will integrate an enterprise with a wage which doesn’t correspond to the required working conditions and without the same advantages than their colleagues already in function?
The institution of the “numerus clausus” for doctors and its keeping during decades when their scarcity was foreseeable for a long time has been a determining factor of the degradation of the health services and of the appearance of medical deserts. That situation has been made worse with the reduction of the number of beds in the hospitals in order to reduce the deficit of the health insurance. To make more difficult the access to doctors has provoked a transfer toward hospitals at a time when their reception capacities were reduced. A vicious circle has then been created: working conditions were becoming more and more difficult, which was generating the going out of employees and which was making reception capacities even more insufficient. In the same time, the bureaucratic environment of the hospitals was prospering, with a cost superior to the realized savings and obstructed the return to a lasting financial balance.
The failure regarding competitiveness also comes from analysis mistakes. The main measure has been the creation of the CICE in 2013 and its transformation into a permanent measure in 2019. It was not limited to the enterprises confronted to international competition. As a first mistake, it was making responsible labor costs of the competitiveness loss. But the German industry, quoted as an example with is trade surplus, had not significantly lower costs. The second mistake was to offer these tax cuts, which cost tens of billion euros, for wages inferior or equal to the minimum level, to reduce them for wages above it and to suppress them for the wages which were superior to twice and half the minimum wage level. But industry needs a very qualified workforce and so pay it well above the minimum wage. It has so partly profited from the measure. It is not surprising that that one has failed to reduce the trade balance deficit.
Decisions regarding pensions risk to be quite also inefficient. The demographic trend is a factor of the charges increase in the future. But the reality of the job market must be taken into account. Enterprises don’t want to keep their employees longer, except in rare exceptions. They are even less interested to hire employees who are more than 60 years old. As a consequence, the rise of the retirement age will have as a consequence an increase of unemployment.
It would have been much more appropriated to progressively increase the contributions ceiling and so to reduce the resources of the complementary regimes. These ones have accumulated years after years substantial surplus and that would have raised much less critics than the idea to directly draw on their reserves. There is also another demographic factor to take into consideration: inheritance occurs more and more near the age of retirement. French people saving is huge, but unequally shared. That so justifies the slowing of the accumulation of the complementary regimes reserves because it is their benefactors who will profit of a high inheritance level.
At last, if France knows a rapid rise of power and natural gas prices, it is well the result of twenty years of wrong decisions in the nuclear power sector: refusal of ordering the EPR which had been certified in 1996 during more than ten years, closure of the Fessenheim nuclear power plant which had received the operating authorization by the Safety Nuclear Authority, acceptation of an European regulation of the electricity market depriving France of the competitive advantage which the nuclear power production was giving to it and at last, announcement in 2017 of a reduction to 50% in the middle term of the nuclear power share in the power production mix when the reduction of the CO2 emissions was based on the economy electrification. Enterprises and household are today paying the price of these mistakes through the inflation and the fall of the purchasing power.
The economic achievements are so much less brilliant that we hear: a low growth, unable to generate enough lasting and well-paid jobs, a continuous degradation of the public services at a time when the level of public expenditures, of the deficit and of the public indebtedness are much too high along with an unprecedent goods trade deficit, excluding energy. It is easy to attribute this situation to external factors against which it is impossible to do something. Truth is different, this situation comes from a successions of heavy analysis mistakes.
The first cause of these mistakes comes from the professional cursus of the French political leaders. In their large majority, they are civil servants who have never put their feet inside an enterprise, except maybe to make short duration work placements. It is impossible to have a pertinent vision of the economy when you have spent your whole life into a department office. As a worsening factor, they have made most of their cursus in France. They have never lived in a foreign country and they are unable to understand how our country is seen and understood outside of our borders.
To that are added the political power practices which, by themselves, generate inappropriate decisions. There is first the communication priority. Taken decisions must be easy to explain and to understand and, especially attract the media attention. The point that it is sure that they allow to solving the issues comes after, in a second position. At the end, it is most always looked for satisfying at least two objectives in the same time, which are sometimes contradictory. The choice to prioritize wages paid at the minimum level did not correspond to industry needs but allowed to satisfying an egalitarian exigence.
France has huge winning cards and it is a rich country. Nothing of what has been observed in the past is irreversible. It is to French people to choose the political programs which content and the leaders whose personal cursus will allow to rectifying these mistakes.