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Preliminary warning

This article brings together in a single document three investigations that I published on X during the month of May 2026. Each one was read, commented on, debated by tens of thousands of French people. Each one starts from a concrete, verifiable, sourced fact. And each one, taken in isolation, already says a great deal. But it is their convergence that, placed end to end, draws the exact face of a country that is no longer running right.

The first dossier tells what a French landlord experiences on a daily basis. Not a foreign investor, not a press billionaire: an ordinary French person who invested the fruit of their labour in a property in order to rent it to other French people. You will discover the administrative and fiscal trap in which the State has methodically locked them, without notice, without consultation, without alternative.

The second dossier tells what the head of a French SME experiences on a daily basis. Not a CAC 40 executive, not the boss of a multinational: a man or a woman who gets up at 5 in the morning to support ten employees and their families. You will discover what the announcement by the minister for public accounts on 23 May 2026 on TF1 concretely meant, and why this episode could, on its own, condemn Marc, Stéphanie and Michel to unemployment.

The third dossier tells another admission, more discreet, but of historic gravity: on 26 May 2026, the French government publicly acknowledged that it needed four independent economists to understand the exact state of the public finances that it has itself been managing since 2017. You will discover the figures hidden behind this admission, and why the electoral appointment of April and May 2027 will not be an ordinary vote.

The fourth dossier, finally, does not tell of an economic drift but of a democratic one: that of an unelected institution, the Constitutional Council, which has arrogated to itself the power to erase the votes of the sovereign Parliament. You will discover the story of this institutional mutation, and why this anomaly can no longer last.

These four accounts are not the work of an opponent. They are the work of a French person who loves their country, who observes its disintegration, and who refuses to remain silent while it is being destroyed. Every figure cited is sourced. Every date is verifiable. Every actor is named. There will be no excuse, in 2030, to say that no one knew.

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I. The French State has a problem with its landlords

I have just seen that the tax on vacant housing is going to double.

So let me get this straight:

You are very lucky that the common folk were calmed with LBD rounds during the Yellow Vests crisis, where Macron had nearly been evacuated by helicopter, and that they are now nicely servile. Accepting to be fiscally hunted like a foul beast if they had the misfortune of building an undeclared garden shed, of installing an undeclared greenhouse to grow their vegetables, and the rest.

Common folk who suffer from the over-taxation of the litre of fuel needed to go to work, no longer allowing them to earn their living serenely, with a level of taxation and a normative and administrative steamroller on the fruit of their labour such that the economic fabric itself bends the knee. Be glad you have common folk who do not yet take up the pitchforks so that the nation may live again.

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From real estate to business: same method, same effects

You have just read the administrative ordeal of a landlord. You will now read the administrative ordeal of a business owner. You will quickly notice that this is no structural coincidence: it is the same State mechanics, applied to another sector, with the same consequences. Taxes are imposed without consultation. The rules are changed without notice. Decisions that would have deserved a parliamentary debate are announced on a television channel. And when the victims try to understand, they are met with texts that trap them without recourse.

On 23 May 2026, on TF1, the minister for public accounts David Amiel announced a decision that, on its own, is going to cost French businesses 2 billion euros overnight. Almost no one heard this decision. No one contested it publicly. No one stood in its way. And yet, its consequences will be measured in redundancies, in bankruptcies, in cancelled investment projects. Here is what it concretely means.

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II. The French State has a problem with its businesses

I have just learned that the minister for public accounts took, on Friday on TF1, a decision that is going to cost French businesses 2 billion euros overnight. So let me get this straight.

The official justification: the State "does not have the means".

  1. No means, but 5.7 million civil servants.
  2. No means, but around 1,500 public operators whose performance no one measures.
  3. No means, but 800 billion euros of social spending each year.
  4. No means, but ministerial cabinets that proliferate.
  5. No means, but 26 billion euros committed for Ukraine.
  6. No means, but 7.3 billion euros of public development aid paid abroad each year.
  7. No means, but 4 billion euros of State Medical Aid each year for illegal immigrants.
  8. No means, but 18 billion euros of interest on the debt for the current year alone, and 75 billion a year by 2027.
  9. No means, but 16 billion euros a year of social fraud never recovered.
  10. No means, but 1.2 billion euros for the Paris Olympics in unforeseen overruns.
  11. No means, but 500 million euros for Notre-Dame found in a few days.
  12. No means, but 12 billion euros a year for subsidised associations whose usefulness no one audits.
  13. No means, but 6 billion euros a year for the CPF that fraudsters have plundered without control.
  14. No means, but net European contributions of 9 billion euros a year, a good part of which comes back in directives that cost us even more.
  15. No means, but there is always enough to subsidise what produces nothing.
  16. No means, but 925 parliamentarians, 577 deputies, 348 senators, and nearly 2,000 parliamentary assistants paid from public funds.
  17. No means, but 34 ministers, 570 ministerial advisers and 2,257 support staff in the cabinets, for an annual budget exceeding 170 million euros.
  18. No means, but 125.6 million euros a year for the Élysée alone, 822 staff at the service of the President, and a budget up 10% since 2023.
  19. No means, and yet: 1,494 public operators listed, 350 billion euros of annual savings identified, seven dossiers of more than 2,500 pages, public, sourced and free on delta-sierra.com. Everything is documented. Everything is costed. Everything is available.

But for you, head of an SME, who produces, who employs, who often cannot even pay yourself a salary, who pays, who invests, there is nothing left.

You think. You do your calculations. You tell yourself that you will not be able to hire the eleventh person you were planning. That you will have to postpone the investment in the new machine. That perhaps, if this continues, you will have to part with Marc, the last to arrive. And that if the activity keeps contracting, you will have to lay off Stéphanie and Michel who have been there for ten years and for whom the salary you pay them is their only hope of keeping their head above water.

Marc, for his part, will never know that it was a decision taken on Friday on TF1 by a minister he had never heard of that cost him his job. He will think it is his fault.

And yet, here is what a French SME boss already pays

To put 100 euros net in the pocket of an employee on the minimum wage, the employer disburses about 155 to 165 euros of full cost (gross salary plus employer contributions). That is nearly 60 euros of levies for 100 euros actually paid to the employee. It is one of the highest tax wedges in the OECD.

↗ Source: OECD, Taxing Wages 2024.

Beyond labour, France is also the country in the European Union that levies the most on the economy: 45.3% of GDP in compulsory levies in 2024, against 40.4% on average in the EU-27, 40.9% in Germany, 34.9% in Canada and 25.6% in the United States. Yes, you read that correctly: 25.6% in the United States.

↗ Source: Insee based on Eurostat, 2024 data.
↗ Source: OECD, Revenue Statistics 2025 (France ranks 2nd in the world).

Worse still: according to the finance bill for 2026, the effective rate of corporate tax paid by SMEs reaches 39.5%, against 18.6% for large companies. The small pay twice as much as the big. This figure is in the finance bill itself.

↗ Source: Amendment no. I-2531, Finance Bill 2026, National Assembly.

Unemployment is already at 8.1%, the highest in five years, and it has been rising for several consecutive quarters. The number of business bankruptcies broke its all-time record in 2024. Hiring is collapsing.

And faced with this, the State responds by transferring 2 billion euros more onto the shoulders of those still standing. Because businesses do not vote. Because business owners do not have time to demonstrate. Because they take it in silence, as always.

You are very lucky, Ministers, that French bosses are still responsible people who prefer to grit their teeth rather than throw their keys on the table. You are very lucky that they have not yet decided, en masse, to close up shop, to go to Portugal, the United States, Switzerland, Dubai, or simply that enough is enough.

But that day will come. And when it comes, you will no longer know whom to tax. Because one does not tax ruins.

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From business to the State: the final admission

You have just understood how the French State methodically squeezes its owners and its entrepreneurs. You will now understand why it does so. The answer lies in a single date: 26 May 2026.

On that day, the government announced that it was urgently entrusting four independent economists with a mission of "transparency and clarification" of public finances. Understand clearly the significance of this admission: the French executive, after nine years in power, publicly acknowledges that it needs four outside experts to understand the state of the finances that it has itself managed since 2017. This is not a reform. It is not an initiative. It is a capitulation before a debt that is no longer piloted by anyone.

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III. An admission of powerlessness at Bercy

On 26 May 2026, the minister for the economy Roland Lescure and the minister for public accounts David Amiel announced that they were urgently entrusting four independent economists with a mission of "transparency and clarification" of French public finances.

↗ Source: joint Lescure-Amiel statement, 26 May 2026, taken up by BFMTV, Les Échos, AEF Info and Acteurs Publics.

The four appointees

Their mission: to produce before July 2026 an objective assessment of the public accounts and rebalancing scenarios by 2030.

Understand clearly what this means

After nine years in power, after having invented and reinvented its own government six times in fourteen months, the French executive publicly acknowledges that it needs four independent economists to understand the exact state of the finances that it has itself managed since 2017.

The admission of powerlessness is of historic gravity.

Let us take up the figures in their brutality

By way of comparison, 74 billion euros of annual interest is more than the total budget of National Defence (50.5 billion in 2026), more than that of Justice, more than that of Higher Education. Every year, France pays in mere interest the equivalent of the budget of a complete sovereign ministry.

And here is the worst: the governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau, publicly warned on 24 May 2026 that without immediate correction, France enters a phase of "gradual suffocation" where the mere debt burden will mechanically absorb all room for public action.

↗ Source: RTL, 24 May 2026.

Who is responsible?

Those who have governed this country since 2017, and those who elected them believing in it.

The public deficit was 2.3% of GDP in 2018. It exploded to 9.0% in 2020 (justified by the pandemic), then never came back down below 4.8%. Seven years later, it is still above 5%. No comparable country in the eurozone shows such persistence. Germany is at 2.8%. Italy has come down to 3.4%. Spain to 2.9%. France, the second economy of the eurozone, has become the worst pupil.

And meanwhile

In other words: the French State levies more than anywhere in Europe, spends more than its revenue, produces no public service of excellence comparable to its neighbours, and has just admitted that it no longer knows how to right the situation without urgently calling on four outside experts.

At what exact moment did you decide that it was acceptable to pay the highest tax rate in Europe in order to obtain, in return, the fastest budgetary drift in Europe?

And here is the truth that neither Lescure, nor Amiel, nor the four appointed economists will state as clearly: a country that needs outside experts to understand its own accounts is a country whose State apparatus has given up piloting.

And it is not the July 2026 report that will change anything. Because the diagnosis has been known for fifteen years. All the successive Courts of Auditors, all the reports of the High Council of Public Finances, all the Treasury missions point to the same structural drifts: public over-employment, countless unaudited agencies, social fraud never recovered, administrative waste, the multiplication of operators without any efficiency control.

What is lacking is not the analysis. It is the political will to act.

And that political will will come only from a citizens' awakening.

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From the drifting State to the confiscating institution

You now have the three faces of the French economic problem: the crushed landlord, the stifled entrepreneur, and a State that no longer knows how to pilot its own finances. But one piece is still missing from the picture, and it is probably the most serious. Because above all these dysfunctions, there exists in France a body that can, on its own, annul the will of the sovereign people expressed by their elected representatives. This body was not chosen by the French. It is not accountable to them. And it has just provided, in May 2026, the clearest demonstration of its real role.

On 21 May 2026, nine people you have never elected erased with a stroke of the pen a vote of the Parliament of the French Republic. Here is how, and here is why this can no longer last.

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IV. When nine unelected people overturn the will of sixty-eight million French people

Anatomy of a legal coup d'État: the LEZ affair and the necessity of abolishing the Constitutional Council.

On 21 May 2026, nine people you have never elected erased with a stroke of the pen a vote of the Parliament of the French Republic. On that day, the Constitutional Council struck down the abolition of the Low Emission Zones (LEZ) that the deputies and senators had nonetheless adopted. Read carefully: the national representation, elected by direct universal suffrage, voted to abolish a mechanism that the French massively reject. Nine politically appointed people restored this mechanism. Such is the state of our democracy.

This article is not an ill-tempered editorial. It is a documented act of accusation. And the conclusion will be crystal clear: the Constitutional Council must be abolished.

1. The chronology of a confiscation

Let us take up the facts, in order, without the slightest approximation.

Step 1: the European origin of the mechanism. The LEZ are not a spontaneous French invention. They stem from a European obligation. Directive 2008/50/EC of 21 May 2008, transposed into French law, sets air pollution limit values for urban areas. France was even given formal notice by the European Commission and condemned on several occasions for chronic exceedance of the thresholds.

First observation: the LEZ are first and foremost a response to a European legal constraint, not a French democratic choice.

Step 2: popular rejection. Faced with the reality on the ground — modest families forbidden to drive in their own city because their 2008 diesel is "too polluting", craftsmen prevented from working, retirees confined to home — public opinion shifted. The deputies, who are in contact with their voters, listened.

Step 3: the vote of Parliament. In joint committee on 20 January 2026, then validated by the National Assembly on 27 January and the Senate on 29 January, the national representation voted to abolish the LEZ as part of the bill to simplify economic life. Amendments carried by Les Républicains and the Rassemblement National, supported even by La France Insoumise — a rare case of union on a societal subject. Representative democracy spoke.

Step 4: the referral to the Constitutional Council. Seventy deputies from the Macronist majority, unhappy with the vote, refer the matter to the Council. Note this point carefully: it is the losers of the parliamentary vote who call on nine unelected people to annul the democratic decision that did not suit them.

Step 5: the censure of 21 May 2026. The Constitutional Council restores the LEZ. Grounds invoked: "legislative rider". Translation: the abolition of the LEZ had no place in an economic simplification law. Twenty-five articles out of 84 were struck down on this procedural ground alone, that is, nearly a third of the text.

The people voted for deputies. The deputies voted a law. Nine appointed people annulled the law. Such is the mechanism.

2. Why was the Constitutional Council created?

To understand the absurdity of the current situation, one must go back to 1958. When General de Gaulle instituted the Constitutional Council by the Constitution of 4 October 1958, the institution had strictly nothing to do with what it has become. Its original mission, in the mind of the Constituent, was twofold and limited.

Firstly, to protect the executive against encroachments by Parliament. Let us remember the context: the 4th Republic had just collapsed precisely because of the omnipotence of an ungovernable Assembly, capable of overthrowing ministries every six months. The Constitutional Council was to serve as watchdog of the Government's reserved domain (articles 34 and 37 of the Constitution), to prevent deputies from legislating on anything and everything. A technical, narrow, procedural mission.

Secondly, to control the regularity of presidential elections and referendums. Here again, a technical mission.

What the Constitutional Council was not supposed to do in 1958:

How did we get here? Through three successive drifts, each broadening the power of the Council without ever submitting this extension to a popular referendum.

Drift no. 1: the "Freedom of association" decision of 16 July 1971. The Council grants itself the guardianship of the preamble of the Constitution and therefore of the "constitutional block" (Declaration of 1789, Preamble of 1946, Environmental Charter). In a single decision, it transforms its role: from procedural safeguard, it becomes judge of substance.

Drift no. 2: the constitutional revision of 29 October 1974. Under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the referral is extended to sixty deputies or sixty senators. Practical consequence: any parliamentary opposition beaten at the ballot box can henceforth refer to the Council to have annulled what the majority has voted. This is exactly what happened in May 2026.

Drift no. 3: the QPC (priority preliminary ruling on constitutionality) in 2008. Under Nicolas Sarkozy, any litigant is allowed to ask the Council to strike down a law in force. The Council becomes a genuine supreme court in fact, without having either the status, or the legitimacy, or the mode of appointment.

Assessment: an institution conceived as a procedural clerk has become a political censor above the sovereign people.

3. Six unanswerable arguments for its abolition

1. The democratic argument: national sovereignty is confiscated. Article 3 of the Constitution provides: "National sovereignty belongs to the people who exercise it through their representatives and by way of referendum." Not by nine appointed people. When an unelected Council undoes what the election has done, it does not protect democracy: it negates it.

2. The argument of the mode of appointment: a pure political casting. The nine members of the Constitutional Council are appointed in equal parts by the President of the Republic, the president of the National Assembly and the president of the Senate. No legal qualification is required. The institution today includes former prime ministers (Laurent Fabius, until February 2025), former presidents of the Assembly (Richard Ferrand, since February 2025), former ministers, political friends. Ask yourself who chose them, and you will understand which interests they defend. A political tribunal appointed by politicians to judge politicians: it is the very definition of institutionalised conflict of interest.

3. The financial argument: 17 million euros a year to gag the people. The budget of the Constitutional Council for 2025 amounts to 17 million euros, up 2% compared to 2024. Each member officially receives about 15,000 euros gross monthly, to which is added, according to several parliamentary and investigative reports, a function allowance of the order of 100,000 euros a year per member, created by a simple unpublished ministerial letter from Florence Parly in March 2001. An allowance which the Observatory of Public Ethics has established has no legal basis, article 63 of the Constitution reserving this competence to the organic legislator alone. The Council responsible for enforcing the Constitution violates the Constitution to remunerate its members beyond the texts.

4. The double-standard argument: a Council of variable geometry. Compare two recent dossiers: on the LEZ, the Council censures for a purely procedural ground ("legislative rider"). On the 2026 budget examined on 19 February 2026, on the other hand, the Council censured no article on substance, validating the essentials of a text on which several parliamentary groups had raised serious constitutional objections. Depending on the subjects, the Council is rigorous or lenient. Depending on the majorities, it is fussy or complacent. An institution that applies double standards is not a jurisdiction: it is an instrument.

5. The comparative argument: other democracies do without it. The United Kingdom, the oldest parliamentary democracy in Europe, has no constitutional court. Parliamentary sovereignty there is absolute: what Parliament has voted, no unelected judge can undo. The Netherlands also has no constitutional review of laws. Yet these countries are not dictatorships. On the contrary: they respect that elementary republican principle according to which the last word always belongs to the people, not to appointed notables.

6. The drift argument: the Council increasingly departs from its role. In recent years, the examples multiply. On the shared-initiative referendum concerning the pension reform, the Council ruled twice (April and May 2023) that the bills demanding the maintenance at 62 years were inadmissible, thus depriving the people of a right that the Constitution expressly grants them. On immigration, on soil, on the LEZ, the Council systematically rules against the parliamentary majority. The leader of the LR deputies Laurent Wauquiez rightly spoke of an "anti-democratic drift" calling for a constitutional revision. Alexandre Jardin, writer and founder of the citizens' movement Bleu Blanc Zèbre, speaks of "a crisis of democracy, a moral crisis, Parliament is flouted". When such diverse voices converge, there is a problem.

4. What must be done: pure and simple abolition

The compromise solutions (reform of the mode of appointment, requirement of legal qualifications, framing of referrals) are poultices.

The problem is not the casting of the Council: it is its very existence.

The proposal is clear and structured in three stages.

A. Abolition of the Constitutional Council by referendum. Article 11 of the Constitution allows the President of the Republic to submit to referendum any bill concerning the organisation of the public authorities. The abolition of the Council falls exactly into this category. It is for the people, and the people alone, to decide whether these nine people must continue to be able to contradict them.

B. Transfer of the residual technical competences. The control of the regularity of presidential elections and of the referendum to a specialised chamber of the Court of Cassation, composed of professional magistrates recruited by competitive examination.

C. Affirmation of parliamentary sovereignty. What the national representation votes, elected by universal suffrage, has force of law without any unelected body being able to annul it. The only recourse remains the people themselves, through the popular-initiative referendum — which will moreover need to be relaxed, but that is another subject.

5. What this affair tells us about the France of today

The LEZ affair is not a technical detail. It is the acute symptom of a serious democratic disease: a system where the elites have organised themselves to systematically neutralise the choices of the people when these choices do not suit them.

The people voted. The deputies voted. The Senate voted. The joint committee ruled. And nine people, because they did not agree, restored what everyone rejects.

This situation is not sustainable. It will not be sustainable.

Either we take our institutions back in hand through legal means — referendum, 2027 presidential election explicitly carrying this subject, parliamentary mobilisation — or the rupture will happen by other, more violent means, as History has already shown us on several occasions since 1789.

The Constitutional Council is no longer the guardian of the Constitution: it has become the jailer of popular sovereignty.

It is time to hand the key back to the people.

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Conclusion — A democratic choice in 2027

Four dossiers. Four faces of the same disintegration. Four fronts where the French Republic fades before a system that no longer serves it.

The landlord now knows that their patrimony has become a permanent fiscal risk. The entrepreneur now knows that their working tool has become a budgetary leak point. The taxpayer now knows that the State they finance no longer knows how to pilot its own accounts. And the citizen now knows that their vote can be erased by nine people they have never elected.

In eleven months, in April and May 2027, France will go to vote for its next president and its next majority. If it reproduces, by reflex, by habit, by resignation or by fear of change, the same political system that has led it here, then it will have accepted to be, collectively, the sheep that voluntarily goes to the slaughterhouse. That is its sovereign freedom. But let it at least do so knowingly.

The figures are public. The sources are official. The responsibilities are identifiable. There will be no excuse to say, in 2030, that "no one had warned us".

It is up to each French voter to decide, in May 2027, whether they continue to finance a system that gnaws at them, or whether they finally choose to redefine it.

It is not for us to be spectators of the decline. It is for us to right the course democratically, before the markets or the street take it upon themselves in our place.

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Epilogue

Farewell my France. You are no longer the one I knew, the country of respect for values, for the anthem and the flag, the country of the pride of being French. Farewell my France of trafficking of all kinds, of unemployment, of Islamism, of polygamy, of laxity, of permissiveness, of the decomposed family. Farewell my France reduced to a state of emergency, my deconstructed France, at war with itself. I want, nevertheless, to remain optimistic and to believe in your awakening. But who will save you?

— Excerpt from the testament book of General Bigeard

Inaptocracy

A system of government where those least capable of governing are elected by those least capable of producing, and where the other members of society, the least able to support themselves or to succeed, are rewarded with goods and services that have been paid for by the confiscation of the wealth and labour of a continually diminishing number of producers.

This analysis is part of the continuity of the works published on this site, notably the Plan de Rupture, the summary and the State reform dossiers. All share the same objective: to restore a real French democracy, founded on knowledge, debate and deliberation.