FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE moved to claim the centre ground of French politics yesterday with an election manifesto that stressed economic prudence, while shifting a greater share of the tax burden onto big firms and the wealthy.
The Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency, who is leading president Nicolas Sarkozy in the polls three months before the first round of voting, said he would protect middle-class France by raising taxes on banks and big firms while injecting more money into schools and job-creation schemes.
In his Sixty Commitments for France, Mr Hollande pledged to spend €20 billion on hiring 60,000 extra school staff and police, to help start-ups and small companies and create 150,000 state-aided jobs. That jobs figure is half what he was pledging just last month.
The socialist promised to lean hardest on the country’s wealthiest as well as its biggest companies and the banking industry. To pay for new spending measures in education and housing, he would raise the upper income tax rate and abolish tax breaks that were of most benefit to the richest five per cent of people.
“The vast majority of the French people will not be called on to make additional sacrifices,” Mr Hollande said as he unveiled the manifesto in Paris.
“If there are sacrifices to be made, and there will be, then it will be for the wealthiest to make them.” Eager to shield his plans from attack by the right and appeal to voters who have been moving towards the centrist candidate François Bayrou in recent weeks, Mr Hollande committed to reducing the public deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2013, to reach a balanced budget within five years and to ease the state’s debt burden, which the right had “doubled in 10 years”.
Without naming Mr Sarkozy, he portrayed the current government as a friend of the rich and big business and stressed there was an alternative that promised more fairness, equity and hope.
He would reorient the state’s efforts towards small and medium-sized enterprises by establishing a public investment bank aimed at supporting start-ups and splitting the corporate tax rate in three: 35 per cent for large companies, 30 per cent for SMEs and 15 per cent for very small firms.
The current rate is 33 per cent, although many large CAC40 businesses pay considerably lower effective rates.
Mr Hollande confirmed plans to raise tax on bank profits by 15 per cent.
The banking industry would be forced to separate its speculative financial market operations and more traditional role of using savers’ deposits to finance industry and the economy – a measure also in the pipeline in the United States and Britain.
In a firm break with Mr Sarkozy’s party, Mr Hollande said he would reduce the share of France’s electricity generated through nuclear power from 75 per cent to 50 per cent by 2025 and would close the country’s oldest nuclear plant, at Fessenheim in eastern France.
He pledged to fight illegal immigration and rejected the idea of a mass regularisation programme for those without their papers. An ambitious plan to hire 10,000 new police officers was omitted from the manifesto, but it said neighbourhood policing, dropped by the Sarkozy government, would resume.
On social policy, Mr Hollande supported gay marriage and said he would allow euthanasia for the terminally ill in certain circumstances.
A government spokeswoman criticised the socialist manifesto, saying it threatened France’s social model and its credibility.
Mr Hollande’s ideas would “put France in the red” and would lead to higher taxes for the middle-class, she said.