By agreeing to become Prime Minister at the beginning of September, Michel Barnier knew that the situation of the public accounts was “extremely serious” and that the discussions on the budget for 2025 promised to be painful. He could not imagine that the 2024 budget, already voted on a long time ago and three-quarters executed, would also give rise to bitter battles, exposing the fragility of the coalition which supports it and the multiplicity of its opponents. However, this is what the day of November 19 showed, in two episodes during which the government found itself under the crossfire of the left, the extreme right and some of its theoretical supports.
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The most spectacular: the rejection by the National Assembly of the end of management bill, a text deemed essential by the government to complete the year without financial drama. Out of 199 voters at the end of the evening, only 53 supported the government text, while 146 voted against. A serious setback, while the minority government of Elisabeth Borne had succeeded in having the deputies adopt the equivalent text by the end of 2023.
The ball is now in the court of the Senate, before, perhaps, recourse to article 49.3 of the constitution, which allows adoption without a vote but opens the door to a motion of censure, therefore to a fall in the executive. “For this government on borrowed time, the path is becoming more and more impassable,” immediately rejoiced the deputy (La France Insoumise) Eric Coquerel, president of the finance committee.
Eminently political text
On paper, this text was not a bomb, a priori. It was simply supposed to make it possible to make some late savings for the 2024 financial year and to open last-minute appropriations deemed necessary. Michel Barnier having chosen not to submit to Parliament a real amending finance law, which would have authorized him to take emergency tax measures, the government was banking on this more innocuous parliamentary vehicle to give a final blow to the budget for 2024 In this context, it was planned to definitively cancel 5.6 billion euros of credits already voted. This mainly concerned various funds temporarily frozen during the summer by Gabriel Attal.
At the same time, new credits of 4.2 billion euros were programmed to cover exceptional additional costs. In particular those, massive, linked to the security of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (1.6 billion euros) as well as the crisis in New Caledonia (1.1 billion euros). It was also a question of paying the 200 million euros that the organization of the legislative elections will have cost the State after the dissolution decided by Emmanuel Macron.
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