Increase in electricity prices: the opposition criticizes the gradual end of the tariff shield

For Fabien Roussel, leader of the Communist Party, this announcement is simply “scandalous and shameful”. “It’s the families, the working classes and the middle classes that will pay,” he adds. For the leader of rebel France Mathilde Panot, the government is “as useless against inflation as it is against climate change”. “Never take this government’s commitments seriously,” PS first secretary Olivier Faure complained on Twitter.

It is “completely abnormal that the government announces an increase today when nothing in our production costs justifies it”, launched the head of LR deputies Olivier Marleix at a press conference, also “very concerned about the evolution (of) gas prices”.

On the National Gathering side, the head of the group Marine Le Pen criticized on Twitter “the increase of more than 25% in the price of electricity in six months to absorb the debacle of Emmanuel Macron’s policy and a European market that preys on the French”.

At the press conference, the president of the pro-independence group Liot Bertrand Pancher asked to “aim at the tariff shield” and to “increase aid to families who need it most, and perhaps reduce it for those who need it least”. “In the current mechanism, the shield is a system of help for all individuals equally,” the leader of the environmental group in the Assembly Cyrielle Chatelain observed at a press conference, believing that it was “an improper use of public money”.

In response to a question from the hon. RN Jordan Guitton, the Minister for Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher defended in the Assembly an investment of “40 billion euros only for the electricity shield in the period 2022-2023”, one of the measures “so that the French can benefit from electricity prices among the lowest in Europe”. “As of August 1, the tariff shield will continue to cover the protection of the French for more than a third of their bill,” the government also claims.