2024-10-30 08:40:00
Imagine a game of snakes and ladders with eleven players and no finish line. Sometimes snakes get up. And the stairs are sometimes lowered.
Players brag about their triumphs, but the game is largely pointless. At some point, the board will be turned over and everything will return to the starting position.
With a bit of exaggeration, this is the strange game played by the National Assembly last week. Nominally, the deputies – divided into eleven groups and three blocks that hate each other – are discussing the state budget for 2025.
This should be the budget that will begin to bring some order to France’s finances and contain its runaway budget deficit. It may yet succeed, but the loud, confusing and bad-tempered debate in the National Assembly last week will have little impact on how much the French state will spend next year and how much the French people will pay in taxes.
Announcement
The left-wing quadripartite alliance of the New Popular Front has won a series of “ideological victories” that would bring 40 billion euros in new taxes to big business and the wealthy on top of the extra 20 billion already requested by Michel Barnier‘s coalition. government.
Some of these “victories” were achieved thanks to unexpressed alliances between the left and Marine Le Pen‘s far right. Others have attracted the support of one of the four parties in Barnier’s centre-right minority coalition – the ideologically variable Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem).
Other sectors of Barnier’s Macronist-Gaullist coalition also voted against their government, if they bothered to show up at all. They have opposed all tax increases that they say will threaten Macronomics’ successful reduction in unemployment over the past seven years.
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National voted in favor of the tax increase and then against the same increases. His far-right troops are uncertain whether, at any given moment, they should be populist or fiscally responsible. The party varies from day to day, according to the opinion of the various barons of the RN while Marine is distracted his trial for embezzlement.
Despite all this sound and fury, and despite sitting until midnight on Saturday, the House failed to meet its Tuesday deadline to vote on the tax portion of the 2025 budget.
Debate on the 1,500 remaining amendments out of 3,650 will resume next Tuesday, when the Assembly was due to begin discussion on the expenditure side of the budget.
Meanwhile, MPs will break to discuss the separate but related social security budget (pensions, healthcare, unemployment, etc.) which is much, much larger than the rest of all state spending combined.
Is everything clear? How could it be? Maybe it’s not meant to be.
Of the approximately 200 amendments adopted by MPs on the fiscal side of the Barnier budget, very few will survive if a budget agreement is reached. Most of the changes will be reversed in the upper house or Senate, where Barnier’s minority coalition is in the majority.
Announcement
In fact, you may not need to reverse the changes. There is a strong possibility that the schizophrenic Assembly will either a) reject its amended budget next month or b) fail to reach any first reading decisions before the 40-day constitutional deadline of November 21.
In any case, all those amendments and “ideological triumphs” will vanish and the original Barnier budget will go to the Senate.
This would be a very satisfying outcome for Barnier. His strategy seems to be to let the kids play and then clean up later.
His government, during last week’s cabinet meeting, granted him the right to use the special powers granted by the government Article 49.3 of the Constitution impose the original tax portion of the budget without a normal vote. He has chosen, for the moment, not to make use of this power which carries the risk of his government being censured by the Assembly and forced to resign.
He plans instead to use his Senate majority to impose something similar to his original budget, while cherry-picking a few amendments that he believes will improve his chances of survival. The freeze on state pensions for six months from January will likely only apply to wealthier pensioners, for example.
Announcement
The Assembly and Senate versions of the budget are expected to be agreed upon in December by a joint committee of both chambers. The government’s majority in the Senate and its 220 seats out of 577 in the assembly should give Barnier a slim majority in this commission.
All good for the government, then? It can ensure that something like your budget is agreed upon in the end.
Not necessarily. It still needs to pass the final version of the budget to the National Assembly with a yes-no vote by the final deadline of December 21. With 70 fewer seats to reach a majority, it has little chance of doing so.
It is at this point that Barnier will likely use his wild card under Article 49.3. If he loses the resulting motion of censure, the budget collapses and he will have to resign.
Everything will depend on the attitude of Marine Le Pen, who holds the final balance of power in this strange Assembly. Will he tell the 142 far-right MPs to vote for chaos – in other words no budget and no government? Or will he abstain in the name of order and compromise? He will also want concessions on immigration and proportional representation in the next legislative elections.
Le Pen seems willing to behave like a statesman. Some of his supporters, unaccustomed to dealing with political and economic realities, would feel more comfortable in the event of failure.
Meanwhile, the bizarre debate in the National Assembly will go on forever. It will continue to be largely meaningless, unless you like ideological snakes and ladders.
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