“…In terms of the gerneal focus of government policy, Hollande campaigned against the Fiscal Compact and the generally neoliberal and austerity focus of Eurozone economic governance, arguing for more redistributive tax and spend policies. However, from 2014 onwards, government policy focused on liberalisation, deregulation, labour market flexibility and a reduction in state spending in order to stimulate growth (McDaniel 2014), promoting what were, for the unions, the very austerity policies he had campaigned agianst. In this respect, it could be argued that government policy changed to align with the injunctions arising form the European Semester and that the first CSR, which always concerns budgets and deficits, is the most important one, conditioning the others, as it is the only one that is backed up by the threat of hard sanctions, in the form of the excessive deficit procedure, in the case of non-compliance (Crespy and Menz 2015).…”