2026 deficit: Bercy aims for 5.4%, the 5% target quietly dropped

According to Le Figaro, the government presented its end-of-year finance bill (projet de loi de fin de gestion) this Wednesday. Bercy, the French finance ministry, still pencils in a public deficit of 5.4% for this year, a figure one branch of the Cour des comptes doubts. The initial target was 5%. The paper speaks of a "failure" for the public finances. The dispatch says nothing more: neither the detail of the missing revenue, nor that of the spending, nor the exact arguments of the Cour. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First observation: the vocabulary. "Failure", "slippage", "autopsy": the deficit becomes a sort of unruly patient. It is commodity fetishism applied to public accounting, where a number acts and nobody decides. Yet a deficit is the balance of very human choices: which taxes are cut, which spending is frozen, which revenue is hoped for. That 0.4-point gap did not happen on its own, and the headline does not say who produced it.

Second observation: the question of the norm. Why would 5% be the right figure, and 5.4% a failure? Because the modern state, as the classic formula goes, manages the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Debt markets, rating agencies and investors demand guarantees, and budget discipline is the currency of those guarantees. One can qualify this: the state enjoys a relative autonomy, and power struggles run through it. But its room for manoeuvre remains bounded by the need for capital to keep accumulating. A deficit target then serves less to balance the books than to signal to bondholders that, when the time comes, the bill will be presented elsewhere.

Elsewhere means, generally, on those who live from their wages: public services, benefits, public employment. Meanwhile, the levy on capital gains, the source of profits, is discussed with far more caution. The dispatch does not tell us what this budget contains on that point; that is precisely the question to put to the lines of the text, figures in hand, once they are public.

Third observation: the role of unemployment. When tax revenue disappoints, it is often because activity and wages disappoint too. The austerity response is to squeeze spending further, and therefore demand, and therefore jobs, sustaining that reserve army which weighs on wages and reassures the markets. Remedy and disease merge, under the blessing of rigour.

So we await what comes next: the Cour des comptes' precise position, the distribution of savings, and above all who will pay for the 0.4-point gap. The deficit, for its part, will not answer: it is only a number.