Left-wing senators left the Senate chamber on Sunday during debates on the state budget for 2025, criticizing a “coup de force” by the government and the senatorial right, who demanded a new examination of several dozen last minute measures.
At the dawn of a high-risk week for the government, threatened with censorship on another budgetary text (the Social Security budget), the three left-wing groups (socialist, environmentalist, communist), in the minority in the upper house , showed their “anger” by deserting the hemicycle, a few hours before the vote on the revenue part of the draft state budget.
They castigate the attitude of the government and the senatorial majority – a right-centrist alliance – who both requested the holding of a second deliberation on several dozen measures which were voted on during the week by a show of hands, most often against the opinion of the Finance Committee and the Minister of Public Accounts Laurent Saint-Martin.
“We have just invented a new tool: senatorial 49.3. We spend hours, day and night, voting on measures, finding compromises. And with the wave of the hand, the deliberations are swept away. It's a real democratic problem in a serious economic and social period,” socialist Thierry Cozic told AFP.
An extra boost
“This government is a minority. It has chosen to instead turn to its right and its extreme right by refuting all the arguments of the left and it is realizing that this is not going to change anything in the attitude of the “National Rally”, which threatens him with censorship, added the communist Pascal Savoldelli, with the ecologist Thomas Dossus denouncing him an “additional coup”.
“This is in no way a denial of democracy,” insisted Laurent Saint-Martin, “it is a question of raising the question of financial balance,” he added.
Indeed, according to government estimates, the budget as modified by the Senate, without corrections, would have worsened the budget balance by 5.8 billion euros, an impact considered incompatible with the search for 60 billion euros of savings, set by the executive.
“We want a copy that is not degraded at the end of the debates,” confirmed the head of the Republicans’ file on the budget, Christine Lavarde.
The price of energy, one of the RN's red lines in its threat of censorship
This second deliberation thus made it possible to reopen numerous sensitive debates, in particular on the price of energy, one of the red lines of the National Rally in its threat of censorship.
The Senate had already removed the possibility for the government to increase taxation on electricity beyond its pre-energy crisis level, ahead of Michel Barnier's announcement on the same subject.
But the senatorial right had compensated for this measure with an increase in the gas tax, a system that it finally agreed to remove on Sunday, at the request of the government.
Several left-wing senators could not help but see “pledges” given to the RN, while Marine Le Pen had been part of its opposition to this measure in recent hours.
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