Bruno Le Maire and Gabriel Attal will have spared no effort to try to rally the right to their objective of reducing the public deficit by the end of the five-year term. All autumn, the two Bercy ministers negotiated with the elected Les Républicains (LR) to convince them to pass the public finance programming law (LPFP), which details the path planned by the government to reduce the deficit to 3 % of GDP in 2027. In vain: the last joint joint commission, which met Thursday, December 15 in the morning and lasted less than an hour, did not make it possible to find an agreement before the parliamentary truce.
The programming law, an exercise imposed by the constitutional revision of 2008, aims to provide a multi-annual framework for the development of public finances, and sets budget balance objectives, which are also those transmitted to the European Commission. It is not binding, but the executive fears that a rejection in Parliament will be interpreted as a signal of laxity at the international level. “We don’t want to burn all our political capital in Brussels on this”, annoyed a minister.
In theory, the adoption of the programming law also conditions access to certain European funds – 13 billion euros must still be paid in 2023. But the government does not wish to resort to Article 49.3 of the Constitution for the have it adopted: the programming law not being a budgetary text, any recourse to this exceptional mechanism would deprive the executive of its use for another bill: it is in fact only possible to use 49.3 only once per parliamentary session, except for budgetary texts for which its use is unlimited.
The 3% target by 2025
The programming law, presented on September 26 by Bercy at the same time as the draft budget for 2023, plans to reduce the public deficit from 5% of GDP in 2023 to 2.9% in 2027, thanks in particular to the pension reform , supposed to bring in 6 billion euros net by this deadline, according to the text. Public debt would be relatively stable, rising from 111.2% of GDP in 2023 to 110.9% in 2027.
After the National Assembly rejected the text on October 25, discussions were initiated in Bercy with LR senators to find a compromise, while the right-wing party was preparing to appoint its new president. They quickly stumbled around two points: the device wanted by the government to constrain the expenditure of local authorities, which the right did not want, and the pace of reduction of expenditure to bring the deficit down to 3%, considered too slow by the elected LRs, who wanted to achieve this objective by 2025, or even 2026. Unrealistic for the executive, which nevertheless gave up its measures relating to local authorities.
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