By accepting to be Prime Minister at the beginning of September, Michel Barnier knew that the situation of public accounts was “extremely serious” and that discussions on the 2025 budget 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 fierce battles, exposing the fragility of the coalition that supports it and the multiplicity of its opponents. However, this is what the day of November 19 demonstrated, in two episodes during which the government found itself under the crossfire of the left, the extreme right and some of its theoretical supports.
The most spectacular: the rejection by the National Assembly of the end of administration bill, a text considered essential by the government to end the year without financial dramas. At the end of the evening, of 199 voters, only 53 supported the government’s text, while 146 voted against. A serious setback, while the minority government of Elisabeth Borne had managed to get deputies to adopt the equivalent text at the end of 2023.
The ball is now in the court of the Senate, before perhaps resorting to article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows adoption without a vote but opens the door to a motion of censure and, therefore, to a fall of the executive. “For this government that is on borrowed time, the road is increasingly impassable.” The deputy (La France Insoumise) Eric Coquerel, president of the finance committee, was immediately delighted.
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 fiscal year 2024 and open last-minute credits that were considered necessary. Michel Barnier had chosen not to present to Parliament a real amending finance law that would have authorized him to take urgent fiscal measures, and the Government was counting on this more harmless parliamentary vehicle to deliver a final blow to the budget for 2024. it was planned to definitively cancel 5 .6 billion euros of credits already voted. These were mainly various funds temporarily frozen during the summer by Gabriel Attal.
At the same time, new credits worth €4.2 billion were scheduled to cover exceptional additional costs. In particular, those, massive, related 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 about 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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