Final negotiations in the Assembly? Marine Le Pen announced this Monday afternoon that the National Rally had tabled an “amendment on the renunciation of the deindexation of pensions” in the Social Security financing bill, the adoption of which would lead her group to renounce vote on a motion of censure against Michel Barnier.
“It’s up to the government to accept it or not to accept it,” continued the leader of the far-right deputies after a meeting of her troops, before joining the hemicycle.
“We are waiting to see the government's position” on this point: “if they do not move, we censor,” a source at the RN told AFP.
In the morning, several party officials had already suggested that the party was clearly leaning towards censorship. For the president of the RN Jordan Bardella, it would take “a last minute miracle” for the government to be censored.
Less than two hours before the final reading of the budget, Prime Minister Michel Barnier had nevertheless announced a new gesture to the RN by committing “that there will be no delisting of medicines” in 2025, while the government had planned to lower the reimbursement rate by 5%.
An announcement made after a telephone interview with Marine Le Pen, according to the Prime Minister who at the same time received his troops, the leaders of the “common base” groups (LR, Horizons, MoDem and Macronists) at the start of the afternoon in Matignon. The government had already abandoned the increase in electricity taxes and reduced state medical aid (AME) for undocumented immigrants, two concessions demanded by the RN.
Michel Barnier is preparing to trigger article 49.3 on the Social Security budget on Monday, at the risk of a motion of censure which could bring him down. The adoption of the latter would be a first since the fall of the government of Georges Pompidou in 1962. The Barnier government would then become the shortest in the history of the Fifth Republic.
France would sink further into the political crisis created by the dissolution of the National Assembly by Emmanuel Macron in June, with the added risk of a financial crisis linked to France's ability to borrow on the markets at low rates. rate.
