Edited by Jossette Combes, Source ESS France site

Speech by Benoit Hamon, recently elected President of ESS France after having been a member of the government from 16 May 2012 to 25 August 2014, as Minister Delegate for the Social Solidarity Economy and Consumer Affairs and then Minister for National Education, Higher Education and Research.

His intervention comes against a backdrop of threats of drastic cuts to the budgets allocated to the SSE in the new government set up after the dissolution of the assembly. Prime Minister Michel Barnier, who comes from the ranks of the Right, has pledged to reduce France’s deficit at the cost of the budgets allocated to local authorities, culture and the SSE, among others. After thanking the VYV Group for hosting the launch of SSE Month 2024, Benoît Hamon, President of SSE France, got to the heart of the matter by revealing two key figures.
The first was that 5.7 million people around the world live in autocracies*.
The second: over the last 33 years, France has increased its risk of falling into an authoritarian regime by a factor of 6**.
Benoît Hamon highlights the change in the democratic environment and the fact that ‘citizens are distancing themselves from representative democracy and consider it powerless to respond to concrete problems’. In this context, ‘the SSE is an incomparable democratic resource to which the government and parliament must turn’. He gave a number of reasons for this:
1. SSE brings together democratic enterprises: enterprises where 1 person = 1 vote.
2. SSE plays a role in repairing the world.
3. SSE promotes freedoms, including freedom of association.
4. SSE embodies civil society

The President of ESS France insisted on the mobilisation of SSE players in the face of a budget that is out of step with the issues at stake. He pointed out that 186,000 jobs*** were threatened by the text presented by the government, not forgetting the indirect impact of the cuts announced for local authorities. Last but not least, there are also sectoral threats: the transfer of charges to supplementary healthcare in the Social Security Financing Bill, and attempts to reverse the IFI tax rate, all of which constitute attacks on the generosity of the French people and companies.