France finds itself in the excessive deficit procedure of the Stability and Growth Pact since 2009. Since the start of the financial market crisis and the following Eurozone sovereign debt and banking crises, France has been unable to honor its European legal obligations and repeatedly entered into conflict with the European Commission when trying to postpone the requirement to balance its budget. This paper compares the fiscal policies and consolidation strategies of two successive French presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, and their respective governments. Drawing on theoretical work on fiscal consolidation and fiscal governance, this paper tries to elucidate the economic, institutional and political variables influencing the ambition, strategies (focused on expenditures or revenues) and results of fiscal consolidation policy in France. It asks more specifically in how far the approach to fiscal policy taken by the current president can be considered to represent a break with the long-standing budgetary approach of both left- and right wing presidents and governments during the last decades.
