Lombard said that if the trade war escalates and it has a negative impact on France’s economic growth, the government plans to accept the fact that its deficit for this year will worsen and won’t cut spending nor raise taxes to prevent that.
“Even if the situation worsens, I don’t want to further cut public spending,” Lombard said, also excluding tax raises.
France had aimed to bring its budget deficit to 5.4 percent of gross domestic product this year, down from 5.8 percent in 2024. The country is already facing an excessive deficit procedure in Brussels after breaching EU spending rules in 2023 that bar member states from running deficits of more than 3 percent of GDP.