Strange meeting. Slightly surreal. On Monday 9 September, at 5.30pm, the National Assembly’s finance committee is due to meet to question Bruno Le Maire and Thomas Cazenave. Two resigned ministers, appointed by a Prime Minister who has since left, Gabriel Attal, but who remain in charge of the news until Michel Barnier has formed his government. And therefore answerable to the elected officials. To add a little spice, Thomas Cazenave, responsible for public accounts, is a member of parliament for Gironde and a member of the committee decided to listen to him…
With this curious meeting, Parliament is entering into a budgetary dance that promises to be unprecedented. To the point that, for the first time, elected officials fear that France will run out of budget on 1Ahem January 2025.
“There is always the risk that big nonsense will invade political life, admits Constance Le Grip, MP (Together for the Republic) for Hauts-de-Seine. Michel Barnier, however, has a great sense of reality and Parliament has enough responsible elected officials to form a majority. It will be long and painful, but we will succeed. »
very busy schedule
While the procedure that should lead to the approval of the state budget is one of the most clearly defined, everything has already gone off the rails at the first stage, which is in the hands of the government. The dissolution and then the postponement of Emmanuel Macron have paralysed the mechanism. The arbitrations were not issued in time. The letters limiting the allocations of the ministries were sent a month late. As for the new Minister of the Economy, who will have to draft the budget, he has not yet been appointed, although this decisive text should be passed on Friday to the High Council of Public Finance.
During this first phase, Parliament was left out. The government followed the law that obliges it to send deputies and senators a first draft of the budget, as regards expenditure, before 15 July. On 2 September, it ended up giving them a summary document, without the same legal value.
With the schedule increasingly tight, Matignon has even considered postponing by one or two weeks the presentation of the budget to the National Assembly, set by law for the first Tuesday in October. Legally, such a postponement seems possible while respecting the Constitution, according to the General Secretariat of the Government. Politically, it seems more difficult. Pierre Moscovici is in favour of it. “I advocate for a real, comprehensive and detailed finance bill to be presented, said the president of the Higher Council of Public Finances Parisian, Sunday, September 8th. And if a few more days are necessary, it is possible. » But senators on the finance committee say otherwise: “The date of the 1stAhem October should be celebrated. The country’s fiscal situation is too critical to add uncertainty to uncertainty. »
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