The fiscal battle resumed vigor in France during the Ukrainian crisis, which makes the prices of energy and transport flame and allow certain sectors to garner very comfortable benefits. On Monday 1 August, in the Senate, the government suffered the offensive of centrists and the left, who wanted to tax the “superprofits” of the companies concerned by 20 % to 25 %. In the background, the publication, on July 28, of the semi -annual net result of totalnergies, which amounted to $ 18.7 billion (18.3 billion euros), almost three times that garnered in the first semester 2021.
Faced with the amendments deposited, the government has remained adamant, as it had already been in the National Assembly. Lacking “the Pavlovian tax reflex”, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, again defended the principle of direct aid to the consumer, like the one that the State obtained from the oil tanker after insistent insistent Pressures on its leaders. In the group’s service stations, the price of the liter of gasoline will drop at the start of the school year, which will amplify the effect of the rebate decided by the State to support purchasing power and contain inflationary pressures.
Since the opening of the parliamentary session, Parliament has become the scene of a merciless struggle between two camps. The first claims to go through the tax to give a signal of justice through crisis, as has already done by Italy and Spain; On the contrary, the second assumes to take other paths than the tax in an attempt to correct the windfall effects which some lucky people take advantage of.
The debate is all the more tense since it has become very dogmatic. Since 2017, Emmanuel Macron does not want to undertake anything that can compromise the supply policy he has launched. He wants to demonstrate that the very decried abolition of the solidarity tax on fortune has increased the attractiveness of the country, doped growth and makes unemployment go back. He needs the duration to try to demonstrate this and does not want to see his message scrambled by the vote of new taxes, even if they are temporary. The left, for its part, continues to make taxation its main marker and its common denominator: no social justice without taking more to the rich, such is the unanimous message that it hammers the ranks of rebellious France to those of the Socialist Party.
This fracture, abundantly underlined by Bruno Le Maire, has the effect of bringing together a little more the presidential majority of the right, but at the cost of serious internal moods: part of the left macronists were favorable to The taxation of “superprofits”, the centrists too, who now openly know. These intramajority tightness show the limits of postures that are too assertive in an environment which requires, on the contrary, a lot of flexibility.
forbids itself in principle, as the government does, to note certain taxes under the pretext that France suffers from being the champion of compulsory levies is reductive. The ecological transition, to take only one example, can only be carried out without an in -depth reflection on how to modulate the tax. It is still necessary that the debate can open.
Make taxation alpha and omega of social justice as does the left is just as lazy, because this prevents him from questioning the effectiveness of public policies in record time . If the citizen wants to find their account there, each camp will have to get out of this war of trenches too complacently staged.