Budget: LR does not intend to make any concessions to the government

Bis repeated. For the second consecutive year, the settlement bill, which is used to close the accounts for the previous financial year, was to be rejected in the National embly on Monday evening. The deputies had to not only revise the accounts for the year 2022, but also those for the year 2021, put back into the debate after a first inconclusive page last year.

“The right will not give discharge to a budgetary policy which leads to bankruptcy”, explains to “Echos” Olivier Marleix, the leader of the LR deputies.

Technical consequences

“Not to vote for an accounting decree just to oppose is really not reasonable”, annoyed Jean-René Cazeneuve, elected macronist and general rapporteur of the budget at the National embly, this Monday before the vote. “It is not clean, it has technical consequences such as the fact of not being able to cancel credits on special accounts”, lamented the deputy of Gers.

Reproaches pushed back bluntly by a right determined to anchor itself in the opposition on the ground of the serious budget. “If the question is whether this risks leading to a payment default, the answer is no”, evacuates Fabien Di Filippo, LR deputy for Moselle and member of the Finance Committee responsible for evaluating public policies.

“The state will not stop functioning because we do not share the same budgetary vision as the government”, corroborates Véronique Louwagie, speaker for the LR group on this settlement bill.

Budgetary vagueness

This setback is a bad omen for another text, much more important for the government: the public finance programming law, which sets the country’s budgetary trajectory until 2027. This must be examined again in July, according to the schedule announced by Matignon.

“We did not go through the process last year, we stayed at the first reading”, notes Jean-René Cazeneuve. Clearly, the idea is to take the version adopted by the Senate in 2022 and add the latest stability program forecasts which were sent to Brussels in April.

“I fear that the opposition will subject the public finance programming law to the same fate as the settlement law,” laments Jean-René Cazeneuve. In the entourage of Olivier Marleix, it is confirmed that the two texts, a few weeks apart, could experience the same fate.

Threat of 49.3

“The settlement bill expresses a political will, choices and budgetary arbitrations that we denounce, erts Fabien Di Filippo. As for the programming law, which is forward-looking, we do not want this trajectory to become a communication tool at the service of the executive. »

The prospect of a rejection bristles the macronists all the more as the text was designed to meet the demands of the LRs, with an increased objective of lowering deficits and debt reduction, and a more demanding savings effort for the State. only for communities this time. “They went beyond the reasonable in financial matters,” Olivier Marleix merely replies.

If the text is not adopted, there will also be a financial impact: the 11 billion euros that France was to receive from Europe under one of the tranches of the recovery plan may not be paid to it. .

There remains the option of recourse to section 49.3 to have the text adopted without a vote. The calendar provides for an extraordinary session in July, which allows the executive to use this very controversial tool without burning its cartridges.