After an overnight session and vote early on Wednesday morning, capping four days of fiery debates, France’s lower house, the National Assembly, has finally adopted a bill of modifications to the 2022 state budget provisions, and which include emergency measures to ease the effects of the current surge of inflation.
The often rowdy debates and the final terms of the budget adjustments underlined the challenges ahead for President Emmanuel Macron’s centre-right government, brought about since his LREM party lost its absolute majority in parliament in legislative elections held in June.
While the party and its centre-right allies remain the largest single group in the National Assembly, it must now count on the support of other parties to push through legislation, as demonstrated in Wednesday’s vote, when it received the backing of the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party. Notwithstanding an early disolution of parliament, this new political balance of the National Assembly will remain in parallel to Macron's second five-year term as president.
The final budget revisions, which follow the Assembly’s adoption last week of other measures to help low-income earners in face of inflation, were approved by 293 of parliament’s 577 members, while 146 voted against and 16 abstained. The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party’s 88 members boycotted the vote in protest at the annulment of a previously approved amendment to raise pensions for public sector employees by 5.5%, in line with inflation, instead of the government's proposed two-tier rise of 5.1%.
Among the new budgetary measures, and which include several adopted last week, is a subsidy to reduce the price of motor fuel by 30 euro centimes per litre in September and October, which was a demand made by the LR party in exchange for its support of the bill, the abolition of the TV licence fee, and the provision of 9.7 billion euros to fund the total nationalisation of struggling energy giant EDF.
Along the way, opposition parties forced Macron’s parliamentary coalition into concessions, including 230 million euros in aid for households to cope with the jump in domestic fuel bills, which the government had initially planned to limit to 50 million euros.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The government’s allies broke ranks over an amendment to provide 300 million euros of extra funding for local authorities, when the centre-right parliamentary group Horizons, created by Macron’s first prime minister Édouard Philippe, voted in favour of the measure alongside the LR, the RN and the leftwing coalition NUPES.
Aurore Bergé, leader of the Renaissance centre-right parliamentary group led by the LREM, was scathing of the move by Horizons, which is otherwise regarded as part of the LREM camp. “When word is given to the executive, it is upheld,” she said. “We uphold it and we will keep to this line of loyalty.”
Meanwhile, centrist Member of Parliament (MP) Charles de Courson commented that the final budget amendments “translate the will of Parliament, and for once that Parliament serves a purpose we can all only congratulate ourselves about that […] We would never have got here without this long dialogue”.
“The era of a parliament that serves as a recording chamber for the desiderata of the president is in the past.”
Economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has been in the post since Macron was first elected as president in 2017, gave vent to his anger at the divisions and makeshift coalitions which have forced him into compromise. “I am stupefied to see parliamentarians who, at length during interviews in TV studios have only the phrase 'recovery of public finances' on their lips, engage such public spending,” he said.
Le Maire’s visible irritation during the debates, when he denounced what he called a “leading astray” of “democracy”, contrasted with the equally visible contentment of radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party MP Adrien Quatennens who, interviewed by public radio station France Inter, declared: “The era of a parliament that serves as a recording chamber for the desiderata of the president is in the past.”
But nevertheless, Macron’s proposed axing of the TV licence fee, which in the past raised a yearly 3.2 billion euros, was adopted with the support of the conservatives and far-right, as was also the case in last week’s approval by the National Assembly of the measures to counter the growing cost of living crisis.
While the broad leftwing NUPES alliance, made up essentially of the LFI, the socialist and communist parties, and the Greens, had only relative sway over the adopted budget adjustments, the LFI were particularly vociferous during the debates, maintaining a strategy of open conflict with the government which they had employed during the previous parliamentary term. “I thought we would talk about the purchasing power of the French people, but again returns the blackmail about France’s [national] debt,” declared LFI MP David Guiraud. Fellow LFI MP Marianne Maximi lamented that, “For the poor, it’s crumbs, for the ultra-wealthy, waves of billions in tax breaks.”
Throughout the four days of debates, Macron’s centre-right Renaissance coalition group regularly attacked the LFI for a lack of budgetary discipline and championing tax hikes. LFI’s president of the National Assembly’s finance commission, Éric Coquerel, addressing Renaissance group leader Aurore Bergé, retorted: “No, we’re not for a rise in taxation in a global sense, but we believe that in [the context of] a participation of everyone in the [public] effort, there must be a halt to the tax exoneration for those who have largely sufficient [means] to take on the crisis, and to the aid given to corporations with nothing in return.”
LFI MP Damien Maudet turned his fire on the conservative LR party for boasting about the compromise it obtained from the government over the subsidies granted for reducing motor fuel prices. “The truth is that we had a historic occasion for lowering prices and taxing super-profits, and you abandoned it,” he told the LR MPs. “[…] We had a historic occasion to work for the middle classes about who you talk all the time; you sacrificed them to preserve the interests of oil companies.”
When the debates over the new budget provisions opened, Communist Party MP Karine Lebon pledged to “test” the Renaissance group “which has never ceased bragging about its spirit of compromise”. While, in the end, the concrete result is a contrasted one, what is certain is that, with the new makeup of Parliament, the debates have indeed been testing for the government.
Meanwhile, the minister for relations with parliament, Franck Riester, on Tuesday announced that the current extraordinary session of the National Assembly will end on August 7th, and MPs will return to debate new legislation as of October 3rd. The reason for the delay, he said, was to allow “all the time necessary for concertation with the parliamentarians and the French people” on future draft legislation. That “concertation” appears likely to be all the more delicate given that the first of the bills due to be put before Parliament is a proposed reform of the unemployment benefits system.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse