France’s Attal pledges to ‘de-bureaucratise’ France in first major speech

France’s freshly-appointed Prime Minister Gabriel Attal vowed to take down bureaucracy and regulatory burden in a major speech in the National Assembly on Tuesday (30 January), joining a growing call across the EU to cut back on red tape.

Pointing the finger at burdensome norm-making has been at the heart of farmers’ concerns in France and across the continent, as trucks and tractors take to the streets to ask for radical change – but it touches on all aspects of the French economy, too.

“It has been estimated that every year we lose 60 billion euros because of regulatory complexities in our daily lives,” Attal said in his ‘general politics’ speech on Tuesday.

The timing of the speech is common for any newly-appointed prime minister in France – a time when they outline their grand political visions for the years to come. It is followed by a debate with other political forces though, in this instance, it did not close with a confidence vote.

Among a stack of policy proposals on labour market reforms, low wages, improved public services, education and public order, Attal honed in on “de-bureaucratisation”- a neologism to mean cutting red tape – to help “the middle class” fare better.

“Throughout our country, French people tell me how regulation oppresses them, restricts them, prevents them from doing things and moving forward,” Attal said.

“When an investor wants to set up an [industrial] project in Europe, one thing is obvious: in France, it takes an average of 17 months to set [it] up. In Germany, it’s half that. This can’t go on!”

The prime minister vowed, at once, to “de-bureaucratise France”. He made announcements about agricultural regulation already last week, but now announced there would be more.

This is not the first time the French government is looking to cut red tape.

Bruno Le Maire, in charge of economy and finance, announced late last year he would push through an ‘administrative simplification’ bill. President Emmanuel Macron also told a press conference earlier this month he wanted red tape simplified – and gone where possible.

In May last year, Macron had been the first to speak of a “European regulatory pause” to give companies breathing space over new Green Deal regulations.

France 'hypocritical' to blame Brussels for farmers’ problems – experts

In deflecting blame for farmers’ malaise to Brussels, by pointing the finger at the EU’s trade policy and ‘red tape’, the French government runs the risk of coming across as “hypocritical”, with little political gain.

Red tape – an EU concern

Such claims, which appear very much as the government’s guiding star in oncoming policy-making, align with the EU’s growing concerns that norms, especially those pertaining to the over-arching pro-environment Green Deal legislative package, are hampering EU citizens and businesses.

A manifesto by the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), leaked by Euractiv last week, said the party would work to “reduce old bureaucracy by introducing a ‘1 in, 2 out’ principle with an overall objective of reducing the regulatory burden by a third, through a specific action plan”.

The same goes for EU liberals’ ALDE, whose campaign goals are to “cut administrative burdens and red tape by following the simple principle of ‘one market, one rule’” – making it clear that lighter regulation will be at the heart of right-leaning campaign discourses months ahead of the EU elections in June.

The German liberals and conservatives are also fighting over who will most effectively cut red tape, in the hope that this sends the right electoral signals to farmers and the working class.

“Half of the bureaucracy that weighs heavily on the shoulders of our companies comes from the EU,” Reinhard Houben, speaker for economic matters of the liberal German FDP party, told Euractiv earlier this month, while the conservative CSU speaks of reviewing the Green Deal into an “Economic deal”.

Joséphine Staron, head of research at Synopsia, a think tank, told Euractiv that “pro-environment norms are needed, but they’ve been rolled out so fast, with no financial support, that it’s become a source of concern”.

“Some EU regulations don’t make clear enough distinctions between different company sizes,” she warned, pointing out that large companies have dedicated regulatory and compliance services, which smaller companies cannot afford, but the regulatory requirements are just the same.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Jonathan Packroff]

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