In recent days, French Prime Minister Michel Barnier has multiplied meetings with opposition forces. The former EU negotiator for Brexit is trying to convince some of the parties that do not belong to the coalition of liberals and conservatives not to join the motions of censure that are going to be presented in the coming days against him and his Government.
After several weeks of parliamentary discussions on the texts related to the general budgets, on Monday the National Assembly must rule on the first of them, the bill on the financing of Social Security. Unable to obtain approval of the legislative project through a vote, as he did not have sufficient support, the prime minister has announced that he is going to resort to article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows this type of law to be adopted without a vote.
This procedure implies that the law is approved under the responsibility of the Executive and opens the possibility for the opposition to present a motion of censure as the only means to stop it. A first vote in this regard is planned for the end of next week. The parties that make up the progressive bloc of the New Popular Front have already confirmed that they will vote against the Government, as they did in the first motion of censure that followed Barnier’s appointment last October.
In that session, the abstention of the 142 extreme right deputies meant that the censorship did not succeed. Marine Le Pen’s statements in recent weeks suggest that on this occasion she will not save the Executive; The leader of the National Group party considers that the budgets presented by Barnier exceed several of the “red lines” imposed by her party.
On Monday, November 25, Le Pen met with Barnier at the Hôtel de Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, to reiterate the list of conditions that the Government must comply with. “We are aware that you will not be able to accept everything, but what is clear is that we are not going to accept that the purchasing power of the French is again amputated. If this red line is exceeded, of course we will vote for censure,” Le Pen summarized this week in an interview with RTL.
Since then, Barnier has already announced several gestures aimed at convincing far-right deputies, although at the moment they do not seem enough. In one interview in the newspaper The Figaro This Thursday, he said that taxes on electricity will not be increased; He also accepted the end of exemptions in employer contributions for the lowest salaries, a measure that the extreme right defends on behalf of workers with lower incomes.
Political victory
Marine Le Pen also demands that the prime minister abandon the idea of a temporary freeze on pensions and reducing the amount reimbursed by social security for the purchase of medicines. To compensate for the loss of State income that these measures would entail, in a context of growing public debt – the forecasts for this year are that it will end up above 6% of GDP -, Le Pen proposes increasing taxation on transactions financial institutions and on the purchase of own shares by multinationals (a method that allows the value of the stock market price to be artificially revalued), in addition to a reduction in international development aid.
Likewise, Barnier has confirmed the creation of a parliamentary mission to explore the possibility of changing the method of scrutiny towards a system that includes at least a proportional vote, an old demand of the National Group, a party penalized by the double election system. lap. A bill in this regard could be presented in the spring of 2025.
Beyond the concrete measures, Marine Le Pen wants the Government to grant her a political victory and to make it clear that the measures to support purchasing power have been imposed by her party. With the first part of the hearings over in the trial against her and her party for the irregular use of parliamentary assistants to finance themselves, Le Pen is once again concentrating on politics and aspires to take advantage of the central position she has occupied since Macron decided to appoint Barnier as Prime Minister.
However, he must return to court on March 31 to hear the sentence. The prosecution requests, in addition to a prison sentence, her disqualification with immediate effect, a measure that, if accepted, would disqualify her from running for hypothetical legislative elections or the presidential election scheduled for 2017.
Consequences
Meanwhile, the Government and the presidential coalition are insisting on the “dramatic” consequences of the possible fall of the Executive and the absence of a budget, as a measure of pressure on the rest of the parties. “If the Government falls there will probably be a quite serious storm in the financial markets,” Barnier warned last Tuesday in an interview on the network. TF1.
Along the same lines, the Minister of Finance, Laurent Saint-Martin, insisted on the consequences that the absence of budgets would entail, including “a tax increase for everyone, since scales would not be made to take inflation into account.” stated in France Inter. Arguments that are rejected by both the far-right party and Francia Insumisa, which in recent days have played down the consequences of a motion of censure and a rejection of the budgets.
Throughout the week, Barnier also explored the possibility of convincing socialist deputies not to vote on the motion of censure. Saint-Martin, who was a member of the PS before joining Macron’s party, appealed to the “unheard-of responsibility” of the socialists if a motion of censure were successful, which would “plunge the country into instability and economic morass.”
But, except for a last-minute surprise, it does not seem that the socialists are going to break with their allies of the New Popular Front, at least immediately. An executive meeting on Wednesday night unanimously confirmed the vote in favor of the motion of censure.
Barnier finds himself in a situation of extreme fragility, without a parliamentary majority to support him, in a context of deterioration in public finances that has led him to prepare budgets that combine a reduction in public spending and an increase in taxes. It also has another element against it: according to a survey recently published by the Elabe Demoscopic Institute, a majority of French people support censorship to his Government.
No government or budget
As reported this week Le Parisian, Macron himself would be assuming that the current Executive will not make it to the end of the year. The newspaper echoes a conversation between the president and several attendees at an official event in which he stated that “the Government is going to fall” and that it will do so “sooner than people think.” Some statements that the Elysée was quick to deny, although the Parisian newspaper has reaffirmed what was published, citing a witness as a source.
The possibility that the year ends without a Government and without the approval of the budgets would be an unprecedented fact in the French system. The combination of political instability and the deterioration of finances is worrying inside and outside France. There was a tense parliamentary session on Thursday, a day in which France Insoumise tried to present a measure to abolish the 2023 pension reform. There were several altercations between deputies and multiple session suspensions.
In the event of censure, if a new government were formed quickly, the approval of new emergency budgets cannot be excluded, although under current conditions it seems difficult. In this sense, leaders of the socialist party are beginning to speculate on the possibility of a technical government, which they would be willing to support, which seems to indicate that they have turned the page with respect to the common candidacy of the NFP, embodied by the economist Lucie Castets.
“The PS is organizing a new coalition with others, instead of with the New Popular Front. Vallaud, Faure, Bouramrene [dirigentes del PS] They are reaching out to them. “Is anyone going to prevent this change of political line?” denounced the leader of LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a message on X.
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