Before budget debates, “Bercy dialogues” prepare ground

The parliamentarians were invited by the Ministry of Public Accounts to discuss the content of the text before its official presentation in the Council of Ministers, Monday September 26. >

a unprecedented situation, unprecedented method. The finance bill (PLF) 2023, which the government should present, Monday, September 26 in the Council of Ministers, is no longer a secret for majority deputies and oppositions. At the end of three afternoons of discussions -“ten hours”, according to the Minister Deputy Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, who led the meetings -, the thirty members of the offices of the finance committees of the Assembly National and the Senate, and the representatives of the various groups who sit there will have had a broad overview of what will contain the first budget of the second term of Emmanuel Macron. A key text, which will be debated from October 10 in a hemicycle where the presidential party has lost an absolute majority.

Eager to show that power is no longer concentrated in Bercy, Mr. Attal had treated the decor, receiving the deputies in different places at each meeting – a first time on the seventh floor of Bercy, a second at the Assembly, a third in the Senate. “All of the groups came and stayed,” he said on Tuesday evening at the end of the third meeting. Including Insoumise France (LFI) and the National Rally (RN), invited even if the two parties are not part of the “Republican Arc” in the eyes of macronists.

“They even had access to tax articles,” said the minister, nevertheless refusing to specify what would ultimately be retained in the proposals of oppositions, which must still be the subject of a technical examination and politics. “The text which will be transmitted to Parliament will not be the one we had planned to transmit before Bercy’s dialogues,” said Attal. While saying to themselves “lucid” in the face of the discrepancy between the “constructive” exchanges of the meetings and “the symbolic political positioning” displayed by the oppositions, which affirmed very early that they would not vote the budget.

“A certain feverishness”

“We have felt an open government to discussion, which also seems to say that it is not completely serene when tackling this budget,” said the deputy of Seine-Saint-Denis Eric Coquerel, President (LFI) of the Assembly Finance Committee. But “the justice of the peace will be on the 26th, and there is a high probability that, on the outline, the text does not move”. The deputy of the Socialist Party Christine Pirès Beaune even evokes “a certain feverishness” of Mr. Attal. “They have very few room for maneuver if the growth is flanked,” she notes.

You have 47.6% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.

/Media reports.