Elisabeth Borne escaped censorship without incident during the night from Friday to Saturday at the National Assembly, after her first 49.3 of the season, an appetizer before the long series announced during the budget review this fall.
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 constitutes adoption in a new reading of the 2023-2027 financial programming bill, transmitted to the Senate.
This motion of censure, the 18th targeting Elisabeth Borne since her arrival at Matignon, responded to the activation of the first 49.3 of the season to have the budgetary trajectory adopted without a vote until the end of the five-year term.
Around ten 49.3s expected
The speaker of Nupes, the socialist Philippe Brun, immediately attacked the Prime Minister. “Your dismissal, your departure, all the French people 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 again accused. Elisabeth Borne preferred to reserve her barbs for “the two extremes of the hemicycle”, LFI and RN. “Demagoguery is your only budgetary course! “, she told these two groups.
“You can cry about 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 adopt the State and Social Security budgets because it only has a relative majority in the National Assembly.
” No risk “
“You will only have lasted three days before drawing a 49.3,” denounced the head of LFI deputies Mathilde Panot from the podium, condemning “authoritarian reflexes”. L’Insoumise has slammed the “worst austerity trajectory ever known in this country”, “70 billion euros in savings on the backs of the French by 2027”.
The National Rally (RN) supported the left-wing motion of censure, accusing Élisabeth Borne of “abusive and repeated use of 49.3”.
On the right, Véronique Louwagie (LR) judged conversely that it was “out of the question to associate with the Nupes”, “its nihilistic ideology” and “its religion of the three + D + expenditure, deficit and debt “.
Rejected by the National Assembly a year ago, this public finance programming bill must serve as a roadmap for the French budgetary trajectory from 2023 to 2027. It notably plans to reduce the public deficit by 4.8%. of 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.