The Socialist tipped to become France’s next leader promised to impose a 75 per cent tax bracket on France’s top earners in a move denounced yesterday by President Nicolas Sarkozy as “worrying amateurism”.
Francois Hollande said it was simply a case of “patriotism to accept to pay extra tax to get the country back on its feet again” and reverse the policies of Mr Sarkozy that he said favoured the rich.
“It is sending out a signal, a message of social cohesion,” he said during a tour of France’s annual agricultural fair in Paris.
Taxing the rich has become a hot issue in an election campaign marked by worry over the economic crisis and rising unemployment, which now stands at nearly three million.
Mr Sarkozy slammed his rival’s tax plan. “This all gives the impression of improvisation, of precipitation, in short of amateurism that is quite worrying,” he said while on the campaign trail in the southern city of Montpellier.
Mr Hollande, tipped to beat Mr Sarkozy in the vote in April and May, on Monday unveiled the plan for a 75 per cent tax rate on all annual earnings above a threshold of a million euros.
Mr Hollande, who said in his first campaign rally last month that the “enemy” was “the world of finance”, had already said he wants to impose a rate of 45 per cent on incomes above €150,000 a year.
The new tax plan sparked fierce criticism and some ridicule from Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party and from other presidential candidates who are all vying to show that they have the magic formula to pull France out of economic crisis.
Mr Hollande “invents a new tax every week without ever proposing the smallest saving”, said Budget Minister Valerie Pecresse, while Foreign Minister Alain Juppe denounced the plan as “fiscal confiscation”.
“And why not a 100 per cent rate?” was the sarcastic reaction from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front who is currently ranked third in opinion polls.
A study by the Eurostat data agency published in June 2010 said that the highest personal tax rate in the European Union was in Sweden, at 56.4 per cent.
When Mr Sarkozy came to power in 2007, he introduced a “tax shield” that capped tax at 50 per cent of all income in a move derided by the opposition as a gift to the well-off.