New Year, new policies (well, sort of)

In many countries the New Year is a time for political leaders to take stock and often announce new policies for the New Year. Of course in France it's the same but in a different way ....

New policies that came in this year include an additional 2c a litre on diesel (Gasoil), this is an ecotaxe to replace another ecotaxe that was one of M. Hollande's flagship policies when he was elected. The theory sounded good; periodically Paris and the Ile de France suffers from bad air pollution caused in part by emissions from diesel vehicles and a significant proportion of the pollution comes from freight vehicles. So ....... tax the freight vehicles depending on how many miles they travel and enforce it by a network of number plate recognition cameras. Great idea in Paris, not so very popular in distant parts of l'hexagone like Brittany where everything has to get transported in by road. So, over a weekend last summer In Brittany a few barricades and burning tyres went up, an Opération Escargot was mounted by the truckers on the roads and a tax office in Morlaix was burnt to the ground. By the Monday there was a new policy; the cameras would be mothballed and everyone would pay a charge on diesel fuel - still not popular in Bretagne but much more unpopular with the company who had installed the cameras who then sued the French Government for an estimated €1Bn euros.

And another flagship Hollande policy has gone south; the 75% top rate of tax on high earners has been axed. Unsurprisingly this led to high earners leaving France, most publicly Gérard Depardieu who at one stage was even offered Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. The real effect felt was when mobile high earners voted with their feet and moved to London and Frankfurt, the unintentional effect of this policy was to diminish M. Hollande's tax receipts at the same time boosting those of George Osborne and Angela Merkel.

At the halfway stage of his premiership Francois Hollande is the most unpopular President of the Fifth Republic (and probably the first, second third and fourth as well) with just 12% approval rating in November. Manual Valls seems to have steadied the government ship with some long-overdue pragmatism but the general prevailing pessimism of my French friends still seems well founded.