France’s lower house, the National Assembly, on Wednesday approved a package of adjustments to the 2022 state budget, which centres on emergency measures to ease the growing cost of living crisis. But the adoption of the measures came after a tortuous series of debates for the government which, after recently losing its absolute majority in the Assembly, was forced into compromises. For opposition groups, it demonstrated a newly invigorated parliament, while for the government it confirmed the serious challenges ahead for pushing through its planned reforms. Mathieu Dejean reports.
Draft budget legislation submitted to the French parliament on Wednesday included an increase in spending on defence, education and justice, while economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire said the public deficit, now at 8.4 per cent of gross domestic product, will be brought back below 3% of economic output by 2027.
Hospital staff, teachers and air traffic controllers were among millions of employees from the French public sector staging a one-day strike on Monday in protest over pay and budgetary restrictions, and notably a wage freeze for certain categories introduced by Presuident Emmanuel Macron, with street demonstrations held in several major towns and cities.
The French justice system is cracking apart from the effects of a dire shortage of personnel and resources, with one of the smallest budgets, in comparison to national GDP, in Europe. Magistrates complain they are crushed by their workload, unable to fulfil their tasks. The chronic logjam of cases has often tragic humain consequences, as Michaël Hajdenberg discovered when he asked six magistrates from different jurisdictions across France to give their own accounts of the problems they face.
Several of France's favourite radio stations, listened to by a quarter of the country's population, have been disrupted by an almost three-week-long strike at Radio France, with many popular programmes taken off the air. The dispute centres on a plan of spending cuts and the shedding of more than 300 jobs, and has become the longest in the history of the public broadcaster, which runs flagship stations France Inter, France Info, France Culture, and France Musique. That prompted culture minister Fleur Pellerin to order management to resume talks with staff, but these ended in stalemate over the Easter weekend. While Radio France, which is 90% state-funded, faces a 21.3 million-euro deficit in 2015, and with the future of one of its two acclaimed orchestras under threat, its boss was forced to apologise for lavish spending on his office and consultants. Meanwhile, France's national audit court has advised that Radio France should save money by merging its four main editorial teams into just one. In this opinion article, Mediapart's Hubert Huertas, a former journalist with France Culture who was also head of the French national journalists' union (SNJ) branch at Radio France, gives his scathing analysis of how a budgetary issue has been turned into a political crisis.
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