Parliament definitively adopts the text which makes it possible to compensate for the absence of a budget for 2025

The Senate unanimously adopted on Wednesday the text which authorizes the executive to levy taxes and borrow to finance the State and Social Security, already voted on in the National Assembly on Monday.

This is a first step towards breaking the budgetary deadlock. The special bill was definitively adopted on Wednesday, December 18, in Parliament after a final unanimous vote in the Senate (345 voters). This text, aimed at ensuring the continuity of the State, was examined urgently after the censorship of Michel Barnier’s government.

After the National Assembly on Monday, the upper house of Parliament approved this atypical bill and very limited in its scope, which authorizes the executive to levy taxes and borrow to finance the State and the Social security. The special law can therefore be promulgated before December 31, but it will not spare the future government and Parliament from providing France with a budget for the coming year.

“This special law gives everything the State needs to ensure its essential functions at the beginning of 2025, but nothing more. It must be completed as quickly as possible” by a budget, estimated the general rapporteur of the finance committee in the Senate, LR Jean-François Husson. As in the National Assembly, the debates revolved around the question of “censorship bill”Michel Barnier’s supporters trying to blame the opposition for their responsibility for interrupting the budgetary debates.

The left, a minority in the Senate, protested against these criticisms. The communist Pascal Savoldelli denounced “a disastrous communication sequence intended to frighten our compatriots”when the ecologist Thomas Dossus estimated that “the same causes will produce the same effects” et “will result in the same fall of François Bayrou”.

Many voices in the Senate, dominated by an alliance of the right and the center, have also used this debate on the special law to call for the budgetary debates to resume where they left off at the time of the censure, without tabling a new finance bill. “This would allow everything to be discussed again, but within a more reasonable time frame” that if we had to start from scratch with a new budget, agreed the socialist president of the finance committee, Claude Raynal.

The indexation of the income tax scale to inflation, a proposal already formulated by the opposition in the National Assembly, has once again been declared inadmissible due to the very restricted scope of this special law, reduced to budgetary emergencies. (field into which, for example, aid for Mayotte falls). But this can be corrected in time if a proper budget is adopted during the first quarter of 2025.