This year, the budget discussion will begin on 1is September and not the 1is october. Not in Parliament but in the office of the Minister of Economy. Bruno Le Maire admits it himself, in recent years he has tended to arrive in the Hemicycle at the last moment for the examination of the finance bill, the main budgetary text of the year, in a National Assembly where the majority was acquired. However, since the legislative elections, times have changed, and the executive intends to learn the lessons of the sequence on purchasing power in Parliament, in particular its second part: the amending budget, the examination of which ended in pain during the night of Tuesday July 26 to Wednesday July 27 in the Assembly with the adoption of several amendments against the advice of the government. An episode that will leave traces, even if the minister assures us, “the unity of the majority has been maintained”. From now on, it will take another month, the time to discuss with the opposition, before presenting the budget to Parliament in October.
While the “purchasing power package” arrives in the Senate on Thursday July 28, Bercy already has this high-risk political deadline in its sights for the start of the school year. A text with high stakes, both for the executive and the opposition. The budget is, it is said, the political text in essence, the one on which the intransigence of elected officials manifests itself in the most spectacular way. “The examination of a budget always has a symbolic meaning, summarizes the former budget minister, Eric Woerth, MP Renaissance. It is the fundamental text in which the majority and the opposition freeze. »
Real uncertainties already hover over the text. Will the Republican (LR) deputies be ready to agree upstream with the majority as they did on the subject of purchasing power, with the price of fuel or overtime? “Given the symbolic importance of the vote on the budget, it is not certain that LR is ready to negotiate as they did on purchasing power”, explains Olivier Rozenberg, professor at the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po. to see the right dissolve into macronism. The battle at the end of the year for the presidency of the party, conducive to one-upmanship, is not favorable either. “We must at all costs prevent the budget from becoming a campaign topic for the presidency of LR “, we warn in the majority.
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