Manifesto 2027-2032: Fifty Costed Initiatives to Relaunch France's Economy

France spends 1,600 billion euros a year, 57% of GDP, more than any other OECD economy relative to its size. It also carries 3,595.5 billion euros of public debt, 119% of GDP, with interest payments set to exceed 100 billion euros by 2028. And it still has 2.4 million people unemployed while schools, hospitals, and transport services go understaffed.

That combination is not a funding problem. It is an allocation problem, and it is the starting point of "Manifeste 2027-2032: Cinquante initiatives pour relancer la France, et le budget qui va avec," a free, fully costed policy manifesto released as a companion to Consented Creative Destruction: How Europe Can Learn to Let Go, and Grow Again, Joel Kremer's book on creative destruction and the Nordic model of change. The manifesto is written in French and addressed to France specifically, applying the book's central argument to a single economy with a single, numbered plan.

The bad trade-off at the root of French stagnation

For three decades, France has chosen to protect the job someone currently holds, through rules, statutes, and subsidies, rather than the person who might lose it. That choice produced a two-tier labor market: heavily protected incumbents on one side, and a majority of new hiring on short-term contracts on the other, because the cost of a bad hire has become too high to risk a permanent one.

The manifesto's reframe is simple: protect the person, not the post. A worker whose rights to retraining, transition income, and mobility support are guaranteed does not need an indestructible job. He needs not to be destroyed when that job disappears. The manifesto argues this costs the same. It just spends differently.

The clearest illustration is the school system. France was short roughly 2,900 teachers at the start of the 2024 school year, while 2.4 million people, a meaningful share of them university graduates, were out of work. The manifesto's signature proposal responds directly: a 60,000-person national teaching reserve, drawn from the unemployed, trained for six weeks, paid at least minimum wage, and deployed to cover short-term absences and tutoring gaps that currently go unfilled.

Fifty initiatives across six work-streams

The fifty measures are grouped into six chapters, each with its own net cost after redeployed spending is subtracted:

• Employability over job protection (10 measures): a portable personal training account, a modulated unemployment contribution tied to how well employers manage layoffs, and a transition contract for workers over 50. Net cost: €4.8 billion/year.
• Schools and the teaching reserve (10 measures): the 60,000-person teaching reserve, 50,000 classroom aide positions, and a simplified, better-paid teacher compensation structure. Net cost: €4.4 billion/year.
• Unlocking business growth (8 measures): ending the regulatory "threshold effects" that punish a company for growing past 11, 50, or 250 employees, a 30-day payment deadline for invoices, and ten years of guaranteed corporate tax stability. Net cost: €0.8 billion/year, the cheapest and highest-leverage chapter in the plan.
• Energy, housing, and infrastructure (9 measures): six EPR2 nuclear reactors, grid investment for RTE and Enedis, by-right building permits in high-demand zones, and fifteen metropolitan express rail networks. Net cost: €9.2 billion/year, the most expensive chapter.
• A state that spends better (8 measures): Sweden-style annual spending reviews, replacing one departing civil servant in two outside frontline services, and consolidating France's 400-plus state operators. This chapter costs nothing and generates €51 billion a year in savings and recovered revenue.
• Territories, Europe, and attractiveness (5 measures): twenty next-generation urban enterprise zones, a points-based work-visa system, and a French Tech visa for founders and researchers. Net cost: €0.4 billion/year.

Total program cost: €31.9 billion a year at maturity, 0.8% of GDP, against a PLF 2027 budget that already demands a €54 billion consolidation effort on its own.

The financing plan: €69 billion in, €19.8 billion net

The manifesto's central claim is that the program pays for itself and then some. Of the €31.9 billion in gross annual spending, €9.8 billion is redeployed from existing budgets and €2.3 billion comes from new revenue measures (a tuition reform and the work-visa points system), leaving a net cost to the budget of €19.8 billion a year.

Against that, the plan identifies €69 billion in annual resources: €22 billion from spending reviews and agency consolidation, €8 billion from capping and cutting the least effective tax loopholes, €6 billion from recovered fraud, €15 billion from pension, health, and local-government efficiencies, €3 billion from unemployment-insurance reform, and €15 billion counted as a "growth dividend," deliberately valued at only one-third of its theoretical yield.

Of that €69 billion, €19.8 billion funds the program and €49.2 billion goes to deficit reduction. Translated to a household earning €3,000 a month, the manifesto's own analogy: €66 a month in new spending, financed by €143 a month in savings and new revenue, with €102 a month left over to pay down debt. The household does not start earning more. It stops paying for services it was not receiving.

Six years, five curves

The manifesto commits to specific, checkable outcomes by 2032: unemployment from 8.3% to 6.5%, the deficit from 5.4% to 3.3% of GDP (reaching the Maastricht 3.0% threshold in 2033, one year late), and public debt peaking at roughly 122% of GDP in 2029 before declining for the first time outside a recession since 2008. It projects 300,000 additional jobs, 110,000 of them created directly by public services the state currently fails to deliver.

Crucially, the plan raises no household tax and creates no new levy. Every euro of net cost is matched against a named, sourced saving, not a growth assumption alone.

What could break the calculation

The manifesto is explicit about its own fragility, listing five assumptions that, if wrong, move the 2032 deficit in the wrong direction: real growth of 2.0% instead of the assumed, average interest rates staying near 3.3%, Chapter 5's spending reviews landing at 80% rather than 100% of target, unemployment falling by a full point, and no recession before 2032. It states plainly that the program survives two of these assumptions failing at once, but not three, and proposes an annual parliamentary review with automatic spending adjustment, not automatic tax increases, as the correction mechanism.

The first 100 days

Ten low-cost, high-visibility decisions are sequenced before the harder structural reforms: by-right building permits in high-demand zones (day 10), automatic penalties for late supplier payments (day 15), three pilot academies for the teaching reserve (day 20), and a ten-year fiscal stability law (day 75), among others. The logic is explicit: governments that lead with visible, popular wins earn the credibility to make the unpopular savings stick, the reverse of the sequence most French reform efforts have attempted over the past fifteen years.

Download the full Manifesto 2027-2032

The complete 23-page manifesto, every initiative, the full financing table, and the risk annex, is free to download and requires no email sign-up: Manifeste 2027-2032: Cinquante initiatives pour relancer la France, et le budget qui va avec (PDF, French). It is designed as a standalone companion to Consented Creative Destruction, applying the book's argument about consent, change, and the Nordic model directly to France's budget.