2023-09-05 22:29:00
The Minister of Public Accounts Thomas Cazenave welcomed Tuesday evening a “constructive exchange”, after more than two hours of discussions in Bercy with parliamentarians from the majority and the opposition around the draft budget for 2024.
In the presence of the Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire, who introduced this second meeting of the “Dialogues de Bercy” after an initial exchange in July, “we came together to build, to find consensus, whatever the ‘outcome of the debate on the finance law,’ said Thomas Cazenave during a press briefing at the ministry.
“We do not agree on everything, it is natural”, he continued while Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne recently mentioned the possibility of forcing the budget through by activating article 49 paragraph 3 of the Constitution, as for the 2023 budget.
But the exchange was “constructive, very open”, and the twenty participants agreed to meet again “in 15 days”, added Thomas Cazenave.
According to a participant in the meeting, the next meeting of the Bercy Dialogues – an initiative launched in 2022 to present the main lines of the budgetary texts to parliamentarians earlier than before – has been set for September 19.
The Chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly Eric Coquerel (La France insoumise), his counterpart in the Senate Claude Raynal (Socialist) and the general rapporteur for the budget at the Assembly Jean-René Cazeneuve (Renaissance) participated in the discussions at Bercy, which brought together representatives of each of the parliamentary groups.
Among the topics of consensus found on Tuesday include “housing” and “ecological transition”, underlined Thomas Cazenave.
The question of increasing taxation on furnished accommodation such as Airbnb, which today benefits from a more favorable tax regime than accommodation rented for longer periods, was also raised.
“Two political groups” represented at Tuesday’s meeting backed the idea of a global minimum tax on individuals, similar to the 15% minimum tax on companies that was enacted under the aegis of the OECD.
With Bruno Le Maire, “we reiterated that we were not at all closed” to this idea, underlined Thomas Cazenave.
The meeting was also an opportunity to present the main lines of the public finance programming law, a text which sets France’s annual deficit and public debt targets until 2027.
Rejected last year by Parliament, the text will be presented there again in an extraordinary session in the last days of September.
A new parliamentary veto would cause France to lose ten billion euros of European funds in 2023 and eight billion in 2024, according to Thomas Cazenave.
These amounts “made a certain number of groups think,” assured AFP Jean-René Cazeneuve after the meeting. “As much as there is today a unanimous observation that the oppositions will vote against the finance law, (as much) there is still the will to find a way to find a majority on the programming law”, he said. completed.
Compared to the first version of the programming law, rejected at the end of 2022, “we have made two important modifications”, argued Jean-René Cazeneuve.
The government has thus given up restricting the expenditure of local authorities, a measure “which was unanimously rejected” by the opposition”, and has accelerated the effort to reduce the country’s debt, by planning to reduce the public deficit to 2, 7% of GDP in 2027 against 2.9% initially.
05/09/2023 22:28:46 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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