Each presidential election offers the opportunity, for the candidates qualified for the second round, to draw up the situation of the country and to formulate proposals. When one of the candidates is the current president, the debate is first about the evaluation of his action he assumes and defend before presenting what he intends to undertake if he is reelected. His opponent has then as a priority, to the opposite, to criticize it, frequently through a caricature, and to explain how he would do better thanks to his program. It is this debate which will be at the center of the presidential campaign next week and it carries a special nature due to the two major crisis the country has just been confronted with the Covid-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

The State having no responsibility in the triggering of these crisis, it is important to analyze how it reacted to cope with it before carrying a judgment on the situation of the country. Even if, at the beginning of the pandemic weaknesses in the public action appeared like essential goods scarcities, whose responsibility can be quite also attributed to the previous governments, or hesitations about the sanitary measures to be taken, it cannot be disputed that the State action through the support of enterprises and employment has avoided the catastrophe many observers and political leaders, especially at the far-right, had forecasted. France did even go through that bad time better than most of the developed countries.

The shock of the war in Ukraine has also been better taken, not due that time to the government action but to the past choices in favor of the energy independence, with at the top position nuclear energy. Even if lags are to be deplored in the launch of a new power plants construction program and if the closure of Fessenheim has been a costly absurdity, the country is in a much better position than Germany whose dependance to coal and to Russian natural gas makes it a very bad pupil in the fight against climate warming and an obstacle to the adoption of efficient sanctions against the Kremlin. For all these reasons, France is clearly less affected by inflation which remains around 4% than Germany where it has overpassed 7%.

The comparison with the situation at the beginning of the Eighties is interesting. The shock generated by the dollar rise and its consequences on the France oil bill, had destabilized the European Monetary System because that rise had more favored Germany which had coal and which exported to the United States and disadvantaged France. Today, we are in the opposite situation. The renouncement to nuclear in the other side of the Rhine has made the country much more sensitive the fossil energies prices increase which explains its high inflation.

The French economy achievement regarding growth is also satisfactory and doesn’t merit the critics formulated by the far-right. During the last four years, from 2019 to 2022, and according to the last forecasts, the France cumulated growth would reach 3.7%, the United Kingdom one 3.1% and the Germany one 0.9%. It is surely much less than in the United States (+8.4%) and, of course in China (+21%), even if this last figure will have to be revised down for 2022 due to the pandemic rebound in the country.

It is not so surprising that the results regarding employment are showing a significant improvement with a rise of employed people of all categories (public, private and independent) of 1.2 million between 2017 and the end of 2021. Unemployment rate fell back to 7.4%, definitely far from full employment and the levels reached in Northern European countries but we must also take into account the very low birth rates in these countries which make the job demand structurally falling. There was in February 2017 3.491 million jobseekers having no job at all and looking actively for one (A category). In March 2022, they were only 2.967 million. Even if this level remains very high, it couldn’t be denied that the trend is favorable.

The trial made about the purchasing power issue is not more justified. After having stagnated during ten years, it has known a significant rebound during the previous five years. Compared to the gross available revenue, it has increased by 1% per year. The recent inflationist crisis which has worsened with the invasion of Ukraine and the tensions on the fossil fuels and the foods prices have started to hurt the poorest household for whom the share of these products in their consumption was high but the measures regarding the wages increases and indexation are on the way and would be extended as long as these tensions will last. The origins are foreign ones and the solutions are well known. There are no reasons to think that in the future they will be abandoned and the recuperation of that legitime preoccupation by the far right mainly comes from an electoral politician maneuver.

The public finance situation has been aggravated during the pandemic but it was the price to pay to avoid an economic catastrophe to the country. The euro has allowed that this increased indebtedness to being financed in good conditions. The far-right candidate program makes a heavy threat weighting on the position of France inside the European Union and lastly on its presence inside it and its position inside the euro zone. The risk starts to worry financial markets. France is not the only country to have a high public indebtedness. That situation is bearable only if the country has a large foreign exchanges surplus, as Japan, which is not the case, quite to the opposite, or if it has a currency well accepted on the international market, as the Unites States. With the abandon of the euro, we would be near the Argentinian model and it would be necessary to call the I.M.F.

The main dark point of the French economy is its high trade deficit and the degradation of its industrial goods exchanges which is not ceasing to increase for 20 years. The analysis made by the previous governments is that the labor costs and tax charges would be its cause and they have adopted costly measures to remedy to the situation without any result. The reality is quite different. As the car industry, which is one of the sectors which has the most contributed to that degradation, shows it, this trend results from the wrong strategic choices of the enterprises which concentrated themselves on sometimes ruinously foreign acquisitions or on de-localizations carrying heavy social consequences and imports increases. There, the State has not played its role through the denunciation at the right time of these practices and, when as a shareholder and as it had the means, it did not oppose itself to them.

So, one of the challenges of the coming mandate will be the successful reconstitution of a true Strategist-State. Even if it is not sure that the outgoing president is ready to accept this change of orientation, it is certain that the far-right candidate, if she was elected would have to face such a financial crisis that the putting into operation of a true industrial policy couldn’t constitute a priority, to suppose that she understands its necessity.

France is going much better that it is said and that French people think. That constitutes a sufficient reason to avoid to the country an useless crisis.