Gabriel Attal had already set the scene during the handover with Elisabeth Borne: “I am thinking in particular of the middle classes, the beating heart of our country, architects of the greatness and strength of our French nation. These women, these men, these families who get up every morning to go to work, who populate our territory, who we don’t often hear but who are always up to their responsibilities.” But who is really in the middle class in France?
In France, the notion of middle class, although commonly used, is not the subject of a precise definition, points out Cnews. It brings together a large part of the population located at the center of the social scale which is sometimes used as an indicator to estimate the economic and social developments of the country. By pure definition, these are households whose standard of living is between two-thirds and double the median standard of living. Two out of three French people belong to the middle class, specifies Midi Libre.
The Ipsos institute recently produced a subjective survey with the question “do you consider yourself to be in the middle class?” To this question, 72% of French people surveyed answered yes. 50% being in the “lower middle class”, 22% in the “upper” middle class.
In a context of significant public debt and while interest rates are on the rise, the question arises of what the Prime Minister will be able to do with the aim of “favoring” the middle classes.
As Mathieu Plane, economist at the OFCE (French observatory of economic conditions) points out at the microphone of RMC, “there is little room for maneuver from a budgetary point of view. The major tax measures were taken over the previous five-year period , such as the elimination of the housing tax, the tax exemption for overtime, the strengthening of the activity bonus (…) it is not going to happen overnight.”
