I don’t know when we lost track; when almost everything has become confused, amnesiac. The “political earthquakes” drive out others, the controversies are born and leave like fits of hives. Everything spins and swirls. When, suddenly, a crisis arises – health, geopolitical, social… – many of us feel the need to take action. Wanting to try to capture the general image, erased from excesses and “elements of language”, to ask an ultimately simple question: “Where are we?”
The mobilization against the pension reform provides an opportunity. The technical debate is fairly well posed in many media. How is demographics changing?, Is it necessary to reform?, On what horizon?, Should we play on age or on the contribution period?, What about hardship?, Employment of seniors?, lower pensions?… Behind these important arbitrations in which each one projects himself according to his personal destiny, some great collective questions torment in the basement, which have everything to do with the “mother question” (namely: where is we ?).
I see at least two essential anxieties.
1. Is the French social model doomed to come undone?
To try to answer this question, we must go back the clocks three or four decades, and understand how globalization has created a new equalization of public spending. Let’s start from the beginning, then: the choice we made to adapt to globalization was to let industry go to countries with very low manufacturing costs, and to bet everything on services. A new international division of labor was born, the geographical and cultural consequences of which we know today. In the developed economies, the creation of wealth has been concentrated in the tertiarized metropolises, and has relegated – helping real estate prices – a whole part of the population to the margins of growth.
If it concerns all Western societies, this great upheaval has had specific effects on the French social model. To cushion the effects of deindustrialization and contain the rise in income inequality, our country has devoted an increasing proportion of its public expenditure to transfers to households and businesses.
A few figures, highlighted by the political science researcher Benjamin Brice*, are enough to be convinced of this: between 1980 and 2019, the share of public expenditure in the country fell from 46.4% to 55.4% (i.e. an increase of 220 billion euros). Most of this increase went to transfers to households and businesses (+8.9 points of GDP), when the share of operating expenses for public services fell by 0.5 points. And yet it is an average: this drop in investment (salaries + purchases) reached 13% in education, or 26% in defence, for example. This explains why, despite our imposing ratio of public expenditure to GDP (the highest in the world), our public services are degraded to the point of creating a feeling of downgrading that is as painful as it is justified. But we are at the end of this path. A social model like ours is financed by the vitality of its economy. But our economy no longer has the breath to finance the system that cushioned the damage of its weakening. Only reindustrialization can get us out of this vicious circle.
Which brings us to the second question.
2. Does the public power still have the levers to change the course of things?
At the heart of French disenchantment is the idea that we have lost all strength to govern. The diagnoses are made, in the sense that for several years the successive crises have led us, overall, to finally recognize some strategic necessities which were once considered totally obsolete (reindustrialization is an example).
But we stick to the rhetoric. The executive is content with declarations, and the opposition with demagogic chins. This impasse is called “regime crisis”. The power is weak. But the alternative is not credible. So that our public life seems to be reduced more and more to a small theater of postures, dialogued by the communication advisers. On the other hand, the examination of concrete solutions to respond to the problems facing our nation has not been done. The work of documenting the issues, debating the alternatives and collective arbitration remains non-existent. As if our leaders no longer believed in it, or no longer knew how to go about it. It’s a shame, it’s called politics. One day or another, we will have to do it again.
* Winning sobriety (Ed. Librinova), July 2022
