The armies, to which President Emmanuel Macron has promised a greater budget allocation until 2030, will soon focus on the capacity arbitrations carried out and the annual distribution of the effort, the subject of bitter discussions between Matignon and his ministry.
The Military Programming Law (LPM) 2024-2030, for a total amount of 413,000 million euros compared to the 295,000 million of the previous LPM, will be presented this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers, before an examination in a public session at the Parliament “5 to 6 weeks later,” according to a government source.
If the continuation of the potential increase in the budget of the armies after years of scarcity is recorded, the challenge lies in the annual breakdown of this endowment.
In a context of strong budgetary tension, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne initially wanted to limit the amount of LPM to 392 billion, underlines the government source, confirming information revealed by The galery. The head of government is now advocating small annual marches to postpone the bulk of the budgetary effort after 2027, that is, at the end of the five-year period.
A scenario feared by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which expects substantial annual increases starting next year to finance immediate capacity needs but also to launch future projects and replenish stocks, an imperative highlighted by the war in Ukraine. Especially since rising inflation and exploding energy costs will mathematically reduce the increase in the defense budget.
Waivers on sight
“The budget trajectory of the LPM is crucial. Matignon’s option of 2,000 million euros (annual) is unacceptable. It would require a colossal effort after 2027. In this turbulent period, Elisabeth Borne cannot play the sorcerer’s apprentice,” Senator LR Cédric Perrin denounced on Twitter on Friday, while the increase planned for 2024 in the previous LPM was 3,000 millions of euros.
Deferring the most significant budgetary increases for several years would not be well received by the defense industry either, which the executive has asked at the same time to put itself in battle order to produce more and at a lower cost. Faced with the Russian-led conflict in Ukraine and the need to send more and more weapons to kyiv, the president called for a move to a “war economy.”
Military aid to Ukraine outside the LPM
Among the programs that could suffer the expected offsets is the A400M multirole transport aircraft, whose initial target of 50 units could be reduced, or the deep-sea patrol boats, whose planned orders could be reduced from 10 to 7. preserve to the extent of As far as possible the budget assigned to the Armed Forces, the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, has already announced that the financing of military aid to Ukraine would not be included in the LPM.
Another precautionary measure, this time in response to a context of acute social crisis: the universal national service (SNU), wanted by Emmanuel Macron, whose funding has been partly withdrawn from the upcoming military programming law, as we learned this Thursday. from various government sources.
A major Emmanuel Macron project, this national service was launched in 2019 specifically and currently only concerns young volunteers (32,000 in 2022). The idea is to eventually make it universal, and therefore generalized and mandatory.
A Senate report, published this week, recommends “suspending” the generalization of the SNU that the Government is studying, “given the uncertainties” of the project, particularly in terms of costs, “probably greater than 2,000 million euros.” ” .
Source: BFM TV
