2023-09-30 09:15:23
Published on September 30, 2023 at 11:15 a.m.
No (bad) surprise for the executive. Elisabeth Borne escaped censorship during the night from Friday to Saturday in the National Assembly, following her first 49.3 of the new parliamentary session.
The motion of censure tabled by Nupes received 193 votes out of the 289 needed to bring down the government, an unsurprising outcome in the absence of support from the LR. This rejection therefore constitutes adoption in a new reading of the 2023-2027 financial programming bill, transmitted to the Senate.
The speaker of Nupes, the socialist Philippe Brun, immediately attacked the Prime Minister. “Your dismissal, your departure, all the French ask me every weekend,” he told Elisabeth Borne, smiling. The deputy for Eure accused the government of “favoring with the greatest servility a very well-endowed minority of the French”, despite “an immense inflationary crisis”. Emmanuel Macron “tried to make Parliament disappear with his repeated 49.3”, he once more accused.
“Demagoguery is your only budgetary course”
Elisabeth Borne preferred to reserve her barbs for “the two extremes of the hemicycle”, La France insoumise and the National Rally. “Demagoguery is your only budgetary course! “, she told these two groups.
“You can cry regarding austerity, it won’t change the facts!” The investments are there,” she said, citing in particular “40 billion” for the ecological transition in 2024 or the increase in “teachers’ salaries of at least 125 euros per month”.
This episode augurs tough parliamentary battles in the weeks to come. The government should use this constitutional weapon of 49.3 around ten other times during the fall to have the State and Social Security budgets adopted because it only has a relative majority on National Assembly.
“We cannot take the slightest risk”
Rejected by the National Assembly a year ago, this public finance programming bill serves as a roadmap for the French budgetary trajectory from 2023 to 2027. It notably plans to reduce the public deficit from 4.8% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 to 2.7% in 2027, below the European objective of 3%, in a context where the debt burden is exploding.
In the version of the text submitted to 49.3, the government reinstated an article, rejected in committee, aimed at making local authorities contribute to the effort, through a trajectory of reduction in operating expenses.
The executive is particularly keen on this law which, he claims, conditions the payment by Brussels to France of 17.8 billion euros over the period 2023-2024, an argument that the left contests. “We cannot take the slightest risk,” Elisabeth Borne insisted on Wednesday in the Assembly, before holding her government accountable for the twelfth time since her arrival at Matignon.
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