At every toll, you are not paying for a road. You are paying a rent.

At every toll, you are not paying for a road. You are paying a rent. And it is the State that organised it.

Did you know?

You take the motorway to go on holiday, to go to work, to see your family. You pay. Dearly. More and more dearly. And you are right to feel that something is wrong.

Here are the figures, sourced, and the name of this scandal: the privatisation of the motorways in 2006.

Let us take up the story again, in its cold accounting truth. In 2006, the government led by Dominique de Villepin decides to privatise the historic motorway concession companies, officially to reduce the State's debt. The sale of the public shares brings 16.5 billion euros to the Treasury. Source: Finance Commission of the Senate, Delahaye report, and IGF-CGEDD report of February 2021.

16.5 billion. Sixteen and a half billion. Remember this figure well, because here is what it really cost the nation.

The dividends paid to the shareholders of the four main motorway companies will reach 76 billion euros by 2036. That is about five times the price at which the State sold off these infrastructures in 2006. Source: commission of inquiry of the Senate, confirmed in April 2025 by Public Sénat. Read it once more.

The State sold for 16.5 billion an asset that will bring 76 billion of dividends to its private acquirers. It sold the hen, and it watches today the others gather the golden eggs, eggs paid for by you, at every toll crossing.

And that is not all. The commission of inquiry of the Senate of 2020 established several facts that should provoke a national anger:

A shortfall of 7.8 billion euros for the State during the privatisations of 2006, aggravated by negotiations qualified as opaque in 2015, conducted under the aegis of Ségolène Royal and Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy. Source: Senate report, September 2020.

Excess profits estimated at 32 billion euros for Vinci and Eiffage until the end of the concessions. Source: Senate and IGF-CGEDD.

A profitability reached as early as 2022 for Vinci and Eiffage, that is sixteen years after the privatisation. The conclusion of the report is limpid: the duration of these concessions is too long by about ten years. In other words, for ten years, these companies will collect a pure rent, without any economic justification. Source: commission of inquiry of the Senate, 2020.

Between 2006 and 2019, the motorway companies have already paid 24 billion euros of dividends to their shareholders. Source: Senate, communiqué of 18 September 2020.

Concretely, for you, motorist, what does that give? A Toulouse-Marseille journey should cost about 14 euros in view of its real cost. You are asked for 35. Up to 25% of every euro that you pay at the toll ends up in immediate net profit for the shareholder.

You are not paying for a road. You are paying a rent.

And meanwhile, the Agency for the Financing of Transport Infrastructures of France, the AFITF, the one that should maintain our roads, our bridges, our everyday railway lines, is amputated of 1 to 2 billion euros per year because of this privatisation. Source: Senate report, bill of nationalisation.

The money that should have financed your infrastructures goes off in dividends towards private shareholders.

Here now is my position, and I fully assume it. This is not a mere management error. It is a political fault of historic gravity, a form of betrayal of the financial interests of the nation.

To sell, for 16.5 billion, a patrimony built by decades of public money and that will bring 76 billion to private interests, is not to manage a country. It is to dismember it.

And the responsible parties have names. The Villepin government which sold off in 2006. The negotiators of 2015, including Emmanuel Macron then Minister of the Economy, who let slip an occasion to rebalance the contracts. All knew, or should have known. The Senate had warned them. The reports existed. No one protected the French.

The solution is clear, and it suffers no half-measure.

The historic concessions come to term between 2031 and 2036: Sanef in 2031, Cofiroute in 2034, APRR in 2035, ASF in 2036. Source: Senate. At these dates, the motorways must return to the public fold, integrally, without the slightest gift, without the slightest disguised prolongation, without the slightest new arrangement that would allow these companies to continue to milk the French motorist.

Not one euro of compensation beyond the strict contractual due. Not one additional year of concession. Not one amendment. The profits must from now on finance the maintenance of the network and the everyday transport infrastructures, via the AFITF, as a senatorial bill already proposed.

A motorway is not a financial product. It is a sovereign infrastructure, paid for by the people, that must serve the people. To return it to the nation is not an ideological option: it is the reparation of a legalised theft.

In 2006 we had been promised a good deal for the State. It was a nightmare for the captive users and a hold-up for the public finances.

It is no longer for us to be spectators of the decline.

For information, the amount of the tolls is fixed by the concession contract that binds each motorway company to the State, and more precisely by its specifications, validated by decree in the Council of State. It is therefore the State that signs, and the company that collects.

For the annual increase, applied each 1 February, the basic rule comes from the decree of 24 January 1995: the rise cannot be lower than 70% of inflation.

Remember well: it is a floor, not a ceiling. And that is where the shoe pinches. Every five years, the State signs with the companies plan contracts: these commit to finance works, and in exchange the State grants them additional rises, beyond the 70% of inflation. The formula then becomes 70% of inflation + an additional percentage. Concrete result: between 2000 and 2006, the tolls rose by 2.06% per year on average, for an inflation of 1.63%. The rates therefore rise structurally faster than the cost of living.

The real problem, pointed out as early as 2008 by the Court of Auditors, is the opacity and the proliferation: a game on the distribution of the rises between sections that allows more increase there where the traffic is the densest. A users' committee, created in 2009, was not even consulted during the renewals of contracts.

In plain terms: it is the State that validates everything. So it is the State that is responsible.

It is no longer for us to be spectators of the decline.