Is Macron still an aid champion?

If foreign aid appeared to have one friend at the top table of international politics in recent years, it was France. So civil society reacted with dismay in recent weeks, when two pieces of news fell within a few weeks. First, economy minister Bruno Le Maire announced in February a €742 million, or 13%, cut to France’s official development assistance for 2024 amid a revised growth forecast. Other areas of government spending were cut too. But in an open letter in Le Monde, nongovernmental organizations called the aid cuts a backward step by President Emmanuel Macron after he had championed the importance of ODA to other world leaders at a summit in Paris in June 2023, and passed a new law in 2021 to progressively raise France’s aid budget as a proportion of gross national income. Then, in April, when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its preliminary statistics for ODA disbursed in 2023, France’s contribution was down 11% on the previous year. Oxfam France denounced what it called a drastic drop, even as needs around the world continue to grow. “What’s happening in France regarding ODA feels like the masks come off,” one civil society advocate, who was granted anonymity so as not to speak in the name of their organization, told Devex. “The international community is finally able to see that behind the French government’s proactive approach and all the communications efforts, there is a lot of blah-blah-blah.” Macron was also trying to placate voters who might otherwise turn to the far right, the advocate said, arguing that “instead of defending why France has a duty to support the most vulnerable populations, the government chose to prioritize domestic interests.” By contrast, French officials sought to put the 13% cut for 2024 in the context of the wider rise in French aid spending since Macron came to power seven years ago. "Our budget more than doubled since 2017,” Chrysoula Zacharopoulou, the minister of state in charge of development and international partnerships, told Devex by email. “It is therefore natural that ODA contributes to the collective budget adjustment effort." Rémy Rioux, head of the French Development Agency, told Devex in Washington, D.C., last month that the adjustment would mean €250 million less in loans and €70 million less in grants, with teams currently working on where the cuts would fall. The bigger problem, according to Rioux, is that the aid budget could be trimmed again as the French government tries to rein in its budget deficit. “So the question will be how far [ODA] is protected,” Rioux said, adding that “there are a lot of decisions again of replenishment, capital increases, to come.” On the 11% drop in French ODA in 2023, Rioux attributed this to a combination of a new ODA methodology; rising interest rates, which made part of France’s loans ineligible to be counted as ODA; the inability to count support to refugees who had been in France longer than 12 months; and fewer multilateral contributions due to there being fewer replenishments in 2023. But on the bigger picture, both Rioux and Zacharopoulou were both adamant that the 2023 drop and 2024 cut did not reflect a dimming of France’s support for low- and middle-income countries. "This is absolutely not incompatible with our ambitious agenda regarding the reform of the international financial system,” Zacharopoulou told Devex. “On the contrary, it is because ODA budgets are constrained and will never close the huge SDG funding gap by itself that we need bold and urgent action: to boost the Multilateral Development Bank’s lending, to channel IMF’s special drawing rights to the poorest, to accelerate debt treatment, and to build new international taxation schemes for climate and development! That is the purpose of the Paris Pact for People and the Planet, now supported by over 50 countries.” The Paris Pact emerged from the June 2023 summit, which was meant to forge a new financial pact with the global south. That in turn followed a summit on financing African economies in 2021, as well as ongoing One Planet summits, which started in December 2017. But the civil society advocate said those efforts are starting to fall flat. “For now, we don’t talk so much about Macron’s Summits any more,” they said. “Everyone is tired of them, not just CSOs or NGOs from the global South or global North, but also other governments which are not so convinced any more: lots of comms but weak results and no real accountability.” A second civil society advocate, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was more circumspect. Yes, the Paris summit last June was always about trying to convince other nations — notably China and the Gulf States — to do more on climate, debt, and development, than it was about France’s own efforts, the second advocate said. But they added that they thought Macron’s commitment to development was sincere. “He’s been to Africa, he’s lived in Africa, and he really believes that Africa is an opportunity for France, for its companies, and France’s soft power,” the advocate said. “And I think he believes that there is a risk that if Africa becomes China’s and Russia’s ally, then it might also be a bit detrimental to Europe.” The real problem, in France, the second advocate argued, was that the traditional center-right conservative party had lost “those Christian values of solidarity.” “Even Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, when you think about it, both of them made real progress on and were kind of supporters of ODA and international development,” the source said. “And we don’t have anyone [on the right] doing that now. Quite the opposite — they are getting used to this narrative that we need to focus on our national policies first.”