An austerity plan characterized by high taxes for large groups and the richest families, as planned, but which also provides for an additional working day for employees, a more limited than expected increase in employer contributions and less efforts for local authorities… This could be the budget for 2025, at least if, as is likely, the final text is close to the government version as the Senate began to modify it on Wednesday, November 13.
After two years of falling deficit, this budget is “the one that finally marks the end of “whatever it takes”” and primer “a massive and unprecedented recovery” After all, the general budget rapporteur in the Senate, Jean-François Husson, elected Les Républicains (LR), already promises.
Let’s forget the taxes created in recent weeks in the Assembly for tens of billions of euros, the expenses revised upwards, as well as the elimination of financing of the European Union by France. This entire first version of the project, with amendments adopted little by little thanks to the left and sometimes the extreme right, was swept away by the general negative vote of the National Assembly, on November 12, on the first part relating to recipes. Garbage can. A first under the Vmy Republic.
“A reversal of what was planned in our democracy”
Thus, the senators meeting on Wednesday in the finance committee started from the initial draft of the state budget, while their colleagues specialized in social affairs worked on their counterpart in the field of Social Security. Intense exchanges with the government are planned for a month. And it is according to the version that will come out of the Senate in December that a compromise will have to be reached in a mixed committee with the deputies, before presenting it to the Assembly, undoubtedly resorting to article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows adoption without a vote.
for once, “so this is where the budgets will be written”, Senators take into account. Some are delighted with the key role that the absence of a majority in the Assembly offers them. The others, more critical: “It is an inversion of what was planned in our democracy, laments the socialist Claude Raynal, president of the finance committee. I hope this doesn’t happen again. »
With the support of the right-wing senatorial majority for the new government, the 2025 budget, as it stands, should, in general terms, remain close to the outline presented in early October by Michel Barnier. It is not about changing the central objective, which consists of reducing the deficit from 6.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) expected in 2024 to 5% in 2025. A totem figure that the executive maintains no matter what, although few Experts believe that such a decrease is possible: “the step is probably too high”, Analysts at Natixis judged again on Wednesday, counting on 5.4%.
You have 52.33% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
