Public aid to businesses: for Bruno Le Maire, it is simply "giving back with one hand what the State has taken with the other"

Was this Emmanuel Macron's former Minister of the Economy speaking, or a future candidate? It's hard to decide, as Bruno Le Maire, interviewed by the Senate's commission of inquiry into state aid to businesses , described how bad things have been since... he left the government. From the pandemic until 2023, he rattled off the list of taxes and duties abolished, a trend that has since stopped in 2024, he claims. The result: "factory openings halved."

The aid, explains the former minister , now a special advisor to a Dutch semiconductor company, and who says he is "very happy in his new life" far from politics, "is the State giving back with one hand what it has taken with the other, confiscatory compulsory levies", "compensation for charges, excessive taxes - this is exactly the opinion of the employers, heard in the same place a few weeks earlier.

Against a "Shadoks policy," Bruno Le Maire proposes "reducing inefficient public spending and rebuilding France's economic and social model." This isn't really what he was asked to do, but rather to question the effectiveness of public aid. He cites the example of the restaurant industry, where "reduced VAT has given the sector some breathing space."

Not the best example to set, according to a study by the Institute for Public Policy, which concluded that the measure primarily benefited restaurant owners, who captured 55.7% of the gains made, and allowed them to increase their profits by 24%. Employees, for their part, only benefited from