00:00Anne-Elisabeth Amoutet is a French journalist and commentator, and it's great to have you back on the program.
00:05Look, Beirut told Parliament that they have the power to overthrow the government, not erase reality.
00:12Why are the budget cuts so controversial that we're about to see the fall of another French Prime Minister?
00:19The budget cuts are controversial because people feel that they are targeted
00:26and that the first ones who agree to something are the ones who are going to suffer most.
00:31The great piece of expense that has costed so much to French society is the cost of pensions.
00:37We have a pay-as-you-go system which worked very well in 1946 when it was created
00:42because you had eight people working, paying for one single pensioner,
00:47but nowadays it's more like one-on-one, and of course it is unsustainable.
00:52In decades now, the French have refused for the pension age to rise.
01:00The French have sort of demonstrated in the streets violently
01:03when they were told that pensions would not be indexed on inflation anymore, so they still are.
01:08And in general, the cost of social levies is almost impossible to change, so that's a big point.
01:15That's almost 40% of the French budget.
01:18And then the government is addicted to a number of subsidies to almost anything in the country,
01:27and all of this is organized by agencies that the government doesn't quite control.
01:32More than 1,000 different agencies for the green economy, for French industry, for farmers, etc.
01:38And everybody feels that they're being targeted themselves.
01:42It's lasted for a very long time.
01:45It has killed many prime ministers.
01:47The first one to go like that was Alain Chouper, Chirac's first prime minister in 1995.
01:53There's nothing new, but the debt has gone much higher.
01:55The debt is particularly high, and it seems that France is struggling to bring spending down,
02:01while other countries, post-pandemic, have kind of got things back on an even keel.
02:06And Beirut says that France is in a life-threatening condition.
02:12Is there a fix?
02:15The fix exists, but it would be taking the kind of recipes that usually you get the International Monetary Fund
02:23visiting your country and telling you, look, you can't go in like this.
02:27It happened to South Korea in 1997-98 after the one crisis.
02:32It happened to Greece after the financial crisis of 2008.
02:37It usually gives good results, but there's a great deal of suffering in the meantime.
02:41And the French say, we're not interested.
02:43We don't want to suffer.
02:44You're lying to us, and the rich can pay.
02:46And France is the country in the Western world that has the most, the highest taxes on individuals already and companies.
02:52So, looking back, many people are saying, look, Macron should never have called that snap election in the first place.
02:58But what's really interesting here is what happens next, isn't it?
03:04What happens next is going to be interesting, because Macron, unless he decides to resign,
03:09and he's being called to resign by people he doesn't like, so he won't,
03:13he's in power for another almost two years.
03:18He will probably appoint a prime minister, because if he were calling an election,
03:24every single poll is showing that the results would be more or less the same,
03:28with probably fewer votes on the left, on the hard left, with more votes on the moderate left,
03:33and more votes for the national rally, even without Marine Le Pen at its head.
03:39So, all of this is a situation where he can't win.
03:44We know that when he appointed François Bayroux, he didn't want to appoint François Bayroux nine months ago.
03:49He wanted to appoint the current and past defense minister,
03:54whose name sort of suddenly escapes me, but who is a good guy.
04:01It's just not my memory, and I've been repeating it all day.
04:04Who is respected, who is a serious person, who has done his job in the situation in which the army was not very happy about Emmanuel Macron,
04:15because three weeks after he had won his bet and became president of France,
04:20he fired publicly the joint chief of staff.
04:25So, that's a possibility.
04:27Or he can go and find somebody else in the opposition and try and say,
04:31well, you know, this is a mess.
04:32You say it has to be solved in another way.
04:34Find a solution.
04:35But that would be pretty fruitless.
04:37So, he's a bit stuck on this one.
04:39And Elizabeth Moutet, unfortunately, we have to leave it there,
04:42but it's always great talking to you.
04:43Thank you for your insight.
04:44Thank you for your insight.
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