National paths to European fiscal discipline

This article questions the implementation of the fiscal rules enacted during the sovereign debt crisis (TSCG, six-pack and two-pack), through an analysis of the institutional struggles to tighten or loosen the legal constraint in the French case. It shows how the government, emerging from a political alternation following the election of François Hollande in 2012, took advantage of the ambiguity of the rules to interpret them in a creative way. While holding theoretically veto power, the French Constitutional Council and the European Commission rallied to the interpretation adopted by the government, rejecting a stricter approach taken by the French Court of Auditors and the Haut Conseil des finances publiques. In a context where, in fact, there is no judicial sanction for failure to comply with the rules, European fiscal law only exerts an indirect constraint.