The publication by INSEE of the mediocre results of the French economy in the 1st quarter with a 0.1% drop in GDP (against 0% in the first estimate) only confirms previous analyses. But past economic policy mistakes such as a family policy penalising those with above-average incomes or the desire to raise the retirement age while companies hardly recruit anyone over the age of 55 or the concentration of tax reductions on low wages which discourages the use of highly qualified jobs,  are not enough to explain the structural weakening that the country is facing.

Bureaucratic inflation, which manifests itself in the adoption each year of texts that are supposed to govern economic and social life, is an equally negative factor. It makes the task of companies more and more difficult because they have to recruit employees whose only mission is to explain the constraints that appear each year, which weighs on productivity. It creates a climate of instability and uncertainty that also affects households like this taxpayer who explained that he could not file his tax return alone since the part concerning capital gains and losses of financial assets had to be filled in in a document that was 17 pages long.

Any investment project must be part of a legislative and regulatory framework set by voluminous texts. This offers the possibility for organisations to open appeals that will lead, most often years later, to legal decisions, which will waste a lot of money and time for the initiators of these projects, which are the main source of growth and job creation.

The State, in this area, has been quite transparent since statistics have just been published describing the extent of the phenomenon. Between 2005 and 2025, the number of articles in existing legislation has almost doubled. At the end of last year, there were nearly 100,000. The increase in the number of articles included in regulatory texts was also very significant: +54%. In 2025, the volume of the various codes and regulations has increased by more than one million words. The explanation for this inflation does not only lie in political activism. When a problem arises, all too often governments believe that the solution will lie first in the adoption of a text and then in the creation of institutions responsible for implementing this solution and monitoring its implementation, hence the proliferation of Authorities, High Councils, Commissions or Observatories.

This process is costly because these new institutions have leaders, space and budgets. They are one of the consequences of bureaucratic inflation, but they are not the cause of it. The mechanism that generates it is similar to an economic phenomenon. It is the continuous increase in the capacity to produce texts and a distorted vision of decentralization that have fueled this inflation. If we want to remedy this, it is essential to have understood this.

It all started with the increase in the length of parliamentary sessions. The reform of 4 August 1995 abolished the system of two three-month sessions of the National Assembly in order to create a single 9-month session. Previously, the 1986 reform introducing proportional representation had increased the number of deputies from 491 to 577. Finally, in February 2014, the ban on the accumulation of mandates was introduced. A deputy could no longer have an executive function in a local authority. Over the years, these elected representatives have become more and more numerous, have been able to sit longer and have had more free time since they had been relieved of their local responsibilities. As a result, they had little else to do, to keep themselves busy, than to propose new texts. Associations and lobbies understood this very quickly and they worked to convince them to work on their proposals and to have them adopted. Thus, in recent years, the majority of texts debated in the National Assembly have come from parliamentarians and no longer from the government.

Decentralization has been another driving force. The principle, adopted in 1982, was based on a profoundly correct vision. When we are closer to those who are concerned, we better understand their expectations and we adopt more effective measures. This was the meaning of the law that Gaston Defferre had adopted at the time. But the state apparatus has never accepted to be relieved of its local responsibilities and it has kept its bureaucratic apparatus in the territories. Regional Audit Chambers have even been created to control elected officials and to investigate, when the prefect considers it justified, litigation procedures. A new local bureaucracy was born.

The situation has worsened with the reform of the regions adopted by the National Assembly in 2014. By reducing the number from 22 to 13, the government wanted to strengthen this political level and simplify local administrative life. He obtained the opposite result. The old regional capitals that had lost their status did everything to ensure that nothing changed in practice and that the administrations remained in place, even if formally, those who signed the texts resided in the capitals of the new regions. In addition, still in the name of proximity, the departments saw their role strengthened. As for the State, its services were sometimes renamed but in no way restricted.

Another solution was possible, to merge the functions of general councillor and regional councillor without affecting the geographical perimeters and keeping the 22 regions. The elected representatives of a department would meet to deal with the subjects assigned to the department. And in the event of subjects relating to the region, the meeting would be extended to the elected representatives of all the departments making up the region. In addition to the savings made by the sharp reduction in the number of advisers, efficiency would be improved by much better coordination between actions concerning the territories.

Germany, thanks to its federal culture, operates with two levels of local representation, the city and the "Länder". We will never succeed in getting people to accept the abolition of one of our three levels, or of the many structures created around cities to manage, for example, public transport. The awareness of an imperative for simplification cannot be translated, as usual, into the creation of a "Simplification Council" or a law aimed at this objective but which would create new bureaucratic constraints.

How can we adopt such a transformation of the institutions that would rebalance the powers by separating them better, each having the means to face the responsibilities that would be theirs? It will be difficult to get parliamentarians and local elected representatives to accept a text that would significantly reduce their number and regulate their activity. The best solution is therefore to draft a new constitution and adopt it by referendum.

France can no longer back down from its social and financial deadlines, which are heavily burdened by the bureaucratic drift that has been underway for at least twenty years. Among the choices, it is preferable to base the debt brake on a transformation of the State that will put an end to public management that is as expensive as it is inefficient and that will contribute to it permanently. The next presidential election is in a year's time, which gives the candidates enough time to formulate their projects for a more efficient and therefore more prosperous France.