"Dissolutions of convenience inevitably lead to crises of regime," Bruno Le Maire responded to Emmanuel Macron on June 9, when the president warned him and the other ministers that he would dissolve the Assemblée Nationale. Since then, despite his profound disagreement with this decision, the finance and economy minister has been campaigning for the governing coalition and fears a financial crisis in the event of a victory for the far right or the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance, which he says is "the far left."
It all depends on what the French decide. The French economy is solid. We put it back on track. However, we have a financial situation that should lead us to make savings, so we can invest and reconstitute margins for maneuver in the event of a new crisis. Yet the platforms of both the far left and the far right are financially unbearably careless. Our creditors and the markets have understood this. For the past two years, the spread between French and German 10-year yields, a measure of investor confidence in France, has been stable at 0.5%, thanks to a strategy for restoring public accounts deemed credible. Since the oppositions have presented their platforms, this spread has jumped to 0.8%, the highest in seven years. France is now borrowing at a higher rate than Portugal. And we risk rapidly paying more than Spain. The extra 0.3 percentage points means €1 billion in additional expenditure per year for the state, and 5 billion in five years.
A debt crisis, if their agendas were fully implemented. Opening the floodgates to public spending at a time when we should be restoring our accounts will lead to France being placed under the trusteeship of Brussels and the International Monetary Fund. The rest is written: austerity and massive tax increases. Or these agendas are not implemented, which means lies, deception and complete political renunciation. So why vote for the extremes?
Yes, it's a risk.
The ECB is there to guarantee the stability of the eurozone, not to save France from unrealistic policies. It has no business intervening in such cases. It can, however, act to prevent the French mistakes from spreading to the other 19 member states of the eurozone.
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