We are receiving and publishing this contribution from Noël ALBIN, Francis TUJAGUE, Jacques VICTOR, Communist General Councillors of the Alpes-Maritimes.
– Local authorities, scapegoat of SARKOZY
It is shocking to see the candidate-president, in his latest electoral campaign announcements, notably pointing fingers at local authorities when he declares that “departments and municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants will have to start reducing their staff like the State has done and decrease their operating expenses at the same pace as the State, which is an economy of 2.5 billion over five years.”
Such statements are even more scandalous coming from the president-candidate who has exploded the public debt like never before, with it being around 66% of GDP when he arrived, rising to 81.7% after three years of presidency, without having the slightest impact in terms of job creation and wealth, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of jobs destroyed during his presidency. The same person who had promised in 2007 to bring this debt back to less than 60% of GDP!
How can such discourse be accepted from someone who increased the debt per French person by more than 20% in just three years to satisfy his friends at Fouquet’s with tax gifts, the total amount of which since the beginning of his term amounts to more than 70 billion euros!
Far from atoning for this disastrous record, he promises to do worse if re-elected and even dares to threaten local authorities potentially resistant to his bitter austerity potion: “In return, the State will no longer impose any standards unilaterally on them, and the communities that do not accept this contractual approach will see their allocation decrease,” he dared to add, saying in the same sentence both everything and its opposite, promising them a difficult future.
In return for what? The dismantling of public services, the bleeding of resources allocated to it with the ominous General Review of Public Policies, synonymous with the elimination of tens of thousands of positions, notably in Public Health and National Education? The massive transfer of incompletely compensated responsibilities that overload the boat of local authorities while simultaneously the State continuously reduces not only their revenues, as with the abolition of the Professional Tax, but also their fiscal autonomy? What credibility and legitimacy can this discourse have when the figures show that, although local authorities account for 73% of public investment, they only contribute 11% to public debt?
Because these same authorities have been forced for years to act as buffers against the social damage of a policy exclusively serving the most privileged.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon was right to demand accountability in Toulouse and to remind that our criteria are not the same: Rather than ransoming our people to subject them to the demands of financial capital and bleed them more each day as he has done for five years, our primary criterion is that of solidarity and wealth sharing. Reviving activity so that the wealth thus produced primarily benefits those who create it through their daily work and ending the dictatorship of the markets. Because as the Front de Gauche and its candidate declare, there is no other solution than to put the human being at the center of defining France’s policy both in terms of economic and democratic development!
