The Telegraph / France unites against François Hollande

A Parisian barrister, himself not a Hollande voter, told me that his Portuguese-born cleaning lady, a single mother of five children, had sworn never again to cast her ballot for the president, as she did last year. “You work hard all your life, you do what’s right, and then they come after the little bit you’ve managed to put aside for your retirement age?” she said. “What kind of a Left-wing government is that?” Once again, the government’s “method”, if it can be called that, seemed to be to first float the idea of a new tax for a few days, then back down if the outcry became too loud. “It’s probably the worst way you can run a fiscal policy,” says Erwan Le Noan, a competition lawyer and international consultant. “The amateurism and uncertainty alone mean businesses have no visibility, and will defer investment — and hires — as long as they possibly can.”

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An unchecked French civil servant can think up some pretty outlandish tax ideas. The French property market is under threat of a new rent control law. This is the pet project of Cécile Duflot, the housing minister and a canny Green ideologue who believes, against all concrete evidence to the contrary, that it will make rents more affordable. Paris estate agents reply that this, alongside the heap of protective regulations skewed towards renters, has already convinced many landlords to just sell and get out, even though the law has not yet been passed. This is, however, small beer next to an earlier proposal, last June, by the Conseil d’Analyse Économique, the prime minister’s office’s forward planning think tank, advising the creation of a “virtual rent” that all property owners would pay, in order to restore more equality between households burdened with rent and the other, rent-free ones. After the CAE report came out, the subsequent fury caused the virtual rent proposal to be shelved, “but that shows you how they think”, says Mr Le Noan. “People remember this. They have no trust at all in this government.”

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