Outside Lidl, Isabelle Martin, a childminder from a village in Creuse, in central France, was loading discounted eggs, sugar and milk into her car. With prices rising, the 55-year-old couldn’t stretch to a full trolley and could rarely afford to drive to Guéret, her nearest town, reports The Guardian.
“I’m constantly thinking about my bank balance,” she said. At home she turned lights off and cut heating, and she never filled her car’s petrol tank completely “because the cost would be too much of a shock”.
But it was when a young relative working as a rural healthcare assistant recently broke down and wept at the fuel pump because she could barely afford the petrol to get to work that Martin’s anger rose. “How can there not be a mood of revolt?” she asked.
Worries about purchasing power and how to make ends meet have become French voters’ top concern before the April presidential election.
The government says that, on paper, people have more in their wallets since Emmanuel Macron’s election in 2017. The treasury estimates that gross disposable income, which economists use as a gauge of purchasing power, has grown twice as fast under Macron than under his two predecessors, helped by tax cuts and job creation.
But because food and fuel prices are rising, and because fixed costs such as housing, insurance, energy and phone bills account for such a large part of French budgets, voters feel a sense of daily struggle.