This Tuesday, the Senate gave its first green light in committee to the “special law”, a budget palliative urgently presented to Parliament after the censure of the Barnier Government, paving the way for its final adoption on Wednesday in the Upper House.
As expected, the senators of the Finance Committee approved this almost unprecedented bill, which authorizes the executive to collect taxes and go into debt to finance the State and Social Security, pending the vote on a formal budget for 2025 .
The general budget rapporteur in the Senate, Jean-François Husson (Les Républicains), proposed adopting this text in the same terms as the National Assembly, which in turn approved it unanimously on Monday night. His opinion will probably be followed in a public session on Wednesday (2:30 p.m.), which would allow its promulgation before December 31.
“This special law provides everything the State needs to guarantee its essential functions at the beginning of 2025, but nothing more. It must be completed as quickly as possible” with a budget, the senator stated.
“The State cannot afford to erase everything”
However, the left, a minority in the Senate, will try to introduce amendments on Wednesday to index the income tax scale to inflation, but they could be declared inadmissible, as in the National Assembly, where President Yaël Braun-Pivet relied in an opinion of the Council of State. The latter in fact considers that the special law is not the appropriate text for this indexation, unlike a true finance bill.
Deputies Charles de Courson (Liot) and Éric Coquerel (LFI), who manage the budget in the National Assembly, propose another option: that this measure, as well as other agreed fiscal measures, be grouped in another bill starting in January .
The senatorial majority, an alliance of the right and the center, opts instead for the budget debates to resume where they left off at the beginning of December, during the censure of Michel Barnier’s government, without presenting a new one. bill. “The State cannot afford to erase everything, throw away the budget and make a new one. We run the risk of having nothing before the end of March,” Jean-François told an AFP journalist, considering that the budget can “correct” without it. having to start from scratch.
Source: BFM TV
