A final blow to try to limit the public deficit in 2024. Less than two months before the end of the year, the government is decided to take new economic measures relating to the current financial year. This is, in part, the objective of the end of management bill examined on Wednesday November 6 by the Council of Ministers, and immediately transmitted to Parliament, which plans to examine it in session from November 19.
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Despite the scale of the text – 187 pages with annexes – and the lack of a majority in the National Assembly, the government is banking on very rapid adoption of this bill. “It is necessary that it be promulgated at the beginning of December, because, alongside the cancellations, it also opens new credits, in particular to secure the pay of civil servants or finance military support for Ukraine,” we indicate in Bercy.
Despite the slippage in public accounts, the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, chose not to submit to Parliament a real amending finance law, which would have made it possible to take emergency tax measures, applicable from 2024. Failing this, the end of management law, a new type of law created in 2021, allows for some late savings. In this context, the State intends to definitively cancel 5.6 billion euros of credits already voted. This mainly concerns funds already temporarily frozen during the summer by Gabriel Attal when he was at Matignon. All ministries, or almost, are concerned.
Unavoidable expenses
“With these cancellations, we are going to the maximum of what is technically possible,” ensures Monde Laurent Saint-Martin, the budget minister. A response to those who, particularly among Macronists, suspect the new government of blackening the public accounts for 2024, to concentrate their recovery efforts on 2025.
At the start of the year, when the first signs of budgetary slippage were confirmed, the government had already canceled credits worth 10 billion euros. Then 16 billion euros were put “in reserve” after the dissolution of the Assembly. “It is not possible today to cancel the entirety of this reserve, but between what is canceled and what is postponed to 2025, three quarters of these 16 billion will not be consumed in 2024,” underlines Bercy, who reads this as a sign of the Barnier team's desire to save money.
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