French government procurement is subject to the budgetary constraints of various public bodies, and is largely driven by local authorities, whose gross savings fell in 2023 and 2024. Concerning central government, against a backdrop where the use of special laws in the early weeks of 2025 and then 2026, along with the finance laws eventually enacted for those two years, confirmed a tightening of certain operating expenditure, political uncertainty has generally increased since the dissolution of the National Assembly in the summer of 2024.

The monthly business tendency surveys conducted by INSEE gauge the optimism among companies reliant on government procurement. According to their responses, companies in the services, construction and civil engineering sectors do not appear to have been adversely affected by the rise in political uncertainty since mid-2024, nor by any potential slowdown in domestic demand. In fact, they are even more optimistic than their counterparts focused on private demand. This observation appears to be broadly consistent with national accounting data: over the past three years, government demand has grown at roughly twice the rate of private demand. However, payment times for public-sector customers in the construction sector have been lengthening markedly since mid-2024, which is not the case for private-sector customers, indicating a gradual deterioration in payment terms for public-sector customers...