Sarkozy promises cuts not tax increases to balance budget

French President Nicolas Sarkozy made balancing the budget the keynote of the last leg of his campaign. If that means cut, so be it, he declared in a letter to the French people Friday.

Reuters/Philippe Wojazer

“France must have a balanced budget,” Sarkozy told a press conference in which he gave the figures that he said his promises would cost and the savings he planned to make.

Portraying his rival, François Hollande, as a big spender, Sarkozy slammed the Socialists for opposing his attempt to inscribe the idea as a “golden rule” in the French constitution.

“This golden rule is to be adopted by all our European partners, whether they are of the left or of the right,” he told the media. “There's only one political party in Europe, the Socialist Party, that opposes this golden rule.”

Sarkozy said he would freeze France's contributions to the European Union budget, saving 600 million euros a year and estimated that chasing up tax exiles and other taxing dividends would bring in eight billion euros.

But there will be no tax increases, he promises in his letter to the French.

Both leading candidates are to rally their troops in the capital the week before the first round of voting.

With Hollande planning a rally at the Bois de Vincennes on 15 April, Sarkozy’s supporters are to hold one in Paris’s Place de la Concorde the same day.

“Faced with the choice between raising taxes and reducing public spending, I will choose reducing public spending,” he writes.

Sarkozy on Friday angrily rejected a report that claims that the rich were the big winners from his first five years in office.

“I categorically deny that,” he told RTL radio, when asked about a study by the Paris-based Institute for Public Policy that found that his tax cuts had mostly benefited big property owners.

With France going through “the toughest succession of crises since the 1930s”, Sarkozy blames globalisation for many of the ills in the world, saying that it cannot stay as it is today “unequal for Westerners, inhuman for emerging peoples, destructive for the planet”.

But much of the letter returns to the favourite themes of Sarkozy and his entourage, law and order and immigration, with harsh words for Hollande’s promise to give non-EU nationals the vote in local elections and a call for a referendum on illegal immigration, as well as one on how to deal with the long-term unemployed.

Sarkozy has angered Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos with his warning to French voters that they did not want to face a crisis like those that have hit Greece and Spain.

“It’s nonsense to compare Spain and Greece, even if one can criticise the policies of their respective [former] Socialist governments,” said Guindos, who is a member of Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government.