2013, a year without elections in France, started with a bang: a welcome agreement on job market reform, some high-risk military operations in Africa, where the destiny of France is decided, and protests against same-sex marriage. As usual, we are concerned by many other topics, more or less important: employment, buying power, and many other events in the area of private life, escalating rapidly, in no particular order.
The risk is high, in this context, at the highest levels of State as in our personal lives, to let the urgent take priority over the important. In particular, that the State does not carry out the reforms without which the country, like the rest of the eurozone, will slide into austerity policies with no future, and will not benefit from the return of global growth in 2014. Then would begin a long declining phase, with unpredictable social and political consequences.
And yet, 2013 is an exceptional year: from 2014, there will no longer be a year without a local, regional, national or European election, until 2018!
It is therefore urgent, for the government to put on the table irreversibly some plans with at least the following five major reforms, which will be a determining factor for the future of the country, although the positive impacts will only show in the long term.
1. The reform of the State and social welfare regimes, by key rearrangements of the state administration, in order to provide effective government services, that are fairer and less expensive. First of all, the abolition of the department, that was recently decided, surreptitiously, by the residents of Lyon and Alsace.
2. Training for the unemployed, which will give full meaning to the job market reforms, by giving a status of salaried employee to anyone in a training situation and actively looking for employment.
3. The prohibition of plurality of mandates, which will allow the rise of new republican elites and finally have the Parliament make decisions of broad national interest, without regard to the local interests of elected representatives.
4. The school reform, by giving as of the start of the 2013 school year some real power to principals, to train a team tailoring its curriculum and teaching to the students’ needs.
5. The proposal to our European partners, without waiting for the German elections, of a real federal project, that would enable us to finally leave the absurd straightjacket of austerity behind, by reviving continental growth through investments financed by long-term borrowing from the Eurozone: it is absurd not to borrow at 3% to fund a huge number of projects whose long-term profitability lies above 6%.
But also and probably more so, it is about creating a completely different atmosphere in this country today, that would let the important take priority over the urgent, at all levels of society and our personal lives; that would value being successful, outstanding, original, risk-taker; that would encourage inner city youth, in the way engineers and more established executives are, to venture into entrepreneurship, to create and grow businesses, cooperatives, mutual societies, associations, without which there will be no growth. And, ultimately, no democracy.
j@attali.com