doIt was an enchanted parenthesis, full of gold and silver, where France, forgetting for a moment its anger and its sad spirit, seemed “having taken a vacation of his own free will”The Spanish newspaper summarized The Countryearly August. We would have almost forgotten about this country. After the excitement of the Olympic Games, which is prolonged to a lesser extent by the Paralympic events, the harsh budgetary reality is taking hold just a few weeks before Parliament examines the 2025 finance bill. The great political and economic event promises to be dangerous: never, under the Vmy Republic, uncertainty had never been greater about the content and approval of the mother of laws.
Matignon and Bercy will not start from scratch. During the summer, the outgoing government undertook an unprecedented exercise: preparing a finance bill described as “reversible”by renewing the 492 billion euros for 2024, a reduction of 10 billion taking into account inflation. The outgoing Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, has also authorised cuts in credits for employment and the environment, while the Ministry of Public Accounts has just recognised a slight drop in projected tax revenues.
A double constraint, political and financial, weighs on the preparation of the budget. Never before seen. Until now, the text allowed the Government with a majority (even a relative one) to present its priorities without any major risk of seeing its copy rejected at the Borbón Palace. Today the logic is inverted and decisions will be dictated by a political rather than a political requirement: to present a text that can be adopted without censorship by the government. “It is around the budget that a coalition or a legislative pact will be built or not”estimated Thomas Cazenave, the resigning Minister of Public Accounts, in an interview published in The Echoes dated August 5.
This finance law is thus given a new role. More than any specific project, it would outline the framework within which a coalition can manage the country, without managing to reform it. With the obvious risk of delivering a budget that reflects the lowest common denominator between the parties that accepted this “legislative pact”, ready to fall apart at any moment. And leave the country in peace until the next dissolution and, more certainly, until the presidential elections of 2027.
Lifting taboos
Even if the three blocs present irreconcilable budget projects, it is not forbidden to dream of parties responsible enough to get out of the dead end into which Emmanuel Macron has put the country. To imagine a right that would remove the taboo of tax increases for the richest, without directly affecting companies, as Gabriel Attal envisages; to see the New Popular Front reconsider its repugnance to any budgetary rigor, as the social-democratic left is ready to do; to discover a national demonstration ready to abandon its ambush tactics and suspend a costly program. In short, to achieve a ” balance “ between “savings and sacrifices” on the one hand, “Specific and fair tax increases” On the other hand, argued the Chiraquian Frédéric Salat-Baroux in The world in early August, like many economists who support such commitments.
You have 45.66% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
