Emmanuel Macron mustn’t assault the European Central Bank | EUROtoday

CThis is a chorus that Emmanuel Macron repeatedly intones. According to him, the European Central Bank is just too strict and imposes rates of interest which might be too excessive, suffocating the French economic system. At the start of December 2025, in an interview with Echoes, he declared: “European monetary policy seems to me to be able to be clearly adjusted today. »

The French president regularly criticizes the ECB. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he called on the institution to intervene more quickly to calm the markets. In 2022, he warned against the rise in interest rates, which was too rapid for his taste. In 2024, he suggested changing the mandate of the monetary institution, to include growth, in addition to inflation, as the American Federal Reserve (Fed) already does.

Are these attacks justified? In France, some economists are also annoyed by the ECB’s monetary policy. The most advanced, Nicolas Goetzmann, chief economist of the management company Financière de la Cité, wrote, in a column in World in December 2025, that “the French economy is subject to the most restrictive monetary policy in the Western world”. For him, the ECB was unsuitable to extend rates of interest in a short time between 2022 and 2023, from −0.5% to 4%.

At the time, after the reopening of the economic system following the pandemic, and with the shock of Russian fuel, the availability of which was lower off by Vladimir Putin, inflation had soared past 10% within the euro zone. Fearing a runaway, the Central Bank reacted very strongly. Wrong reply, believes Mr. Goetzmann: the ECB has “applied to the euro zone a treatment designed to curb demand while inflation came from imported energy”.

Parliamentary hubbub

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