François Hollande celebrated his 60th birthday this week with his four children in the relative peace and quiet of an official holiday in southern France. But if the country’s embattled socialist president was hoping for some respite from what has been a testing year, he can probably think again, reports The Financial Times.
Growth figures, out on Thursday, are expected to show that the French economy barely expanded during the second quarter of this year after stagnating in the first. Most economists now estimate growth of between zero and 0.1 per cent after recording no growth in the first quarter.
If confirmed, the result will make it all but impossible to achieve the government’s growth forecast for 2014 of 1 per cent, in turn complicating a series of other related targets on which the French economy – and his own political fortunes – rest.
“For the past three or four years, we have not been able to improve the growth mechanism,” says Philippe Waechter, chief economist at Natixis Asset Management in Paris. “There is no real strength and no real impulse in the French economy.”
All this is bad news for a leader counting on economic growth to overcome two overriding challenges in the remaining three years of his presidency: to reduce France’s budget deficit; and to bring down France’s persistently high unemployment.
Read more of this report from The Financial Times.