After bakers, restaurateurs and then all craftsmen will be entitled to aid in the face of soaring energy costs. But that will be all. “The State is not intended to bear all the additional costs” warned government spokesman Olivier Véran on Friday. “If we did, we would maintain this loop which is not virtuous in the rise in the cost of energy and that would maintain inflation”, he assured on RMC-BFMTV about the growing list of sectors claiming aid.
“It’s a list that is not infinite,” he decided. “If the State said ‘we pay all the additional costs’, that means that the additional costs will increase”, he insisted, explaining that “we are not in the” whatever the cost ” , we are in the right help at the right time for those who need it”.
Work longer
On another subject, also sensitive, Olivier Véran again defended the government’s project on pension reform. “Just because a reform is unpopular doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done,” he said. “When you are in power, especially when you have warned, explained why you were going to make this reform, the spirit of responsibility is to do it,” he added on BFMTV and RMC.
According to him, the “diagnosis is shared because it is factual”: “We need today, in responsibility, to prepare the retirement system of the French people of tomorrow, that is to say to balance income and expenditure”.
Recognizing on the other hand disagreements on the “solutions”, he once again defended that of the government: “we must be able to work a little longer”, but, he specifies, “we do not say, we will do it blindly, we will ask for a fair distribution of the effort”.