End of the imbroglio within the government? “There will be no increase in gas taxes,” government spokesperson Maud Bregeon said on BFM this Sunday, putting an end to questions on the subject. “Today this is the position of the government, it is the arbitration that has been formulated” by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, she assured.
Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin said on Saturday that he was “not in favor of it”, while Minister of Ecological Transition and Energy Agnès Pannier-Runacher said on Friday that the government was considering it through ‘amendments.
The tax in question is the TICGN (domestic consumption tax on natural gas). It “doubled at the beginning of last year,” recalled the spokesperson, “if we increased it again at the beginning of January 2025, it is the French who would pay the full brunt of the increase”, but “our objective is that French bills do not increase. »
“Punitive ecology is not the solution”
Agnès Pannier-Runacher had justified, among other things, the possibility of an increase in gas taxation by the need, according to her, to “give coherent price signals between carbon solutions and decarbonized solutions”.
“It is above all important to prevent public policies and public money from making carbon solutions less expensive than decarbonized solutions”, underlined the minister, with particular reference to the increase in electricity taxation, essentially decarbonized in France due to the importance of nuclear power.
Maud Bregeon responded this Sunday by explaining that “the energy transition must be accepted and acceptable, it cannot happen through money that we would take from the pockets of the French”, and recalled that “12 million French people heat themselves today on gas. » “Punitive ecology and the ecology which consists of making people pay more and more is not the solution,” she added.
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