End of suspense in sight. The government should press the 49.3 button on Wednesday to shorten the bitter debates on the first part of the budget for 2023, which have tested the presidential camp and frustrated the opposition. After accusing the latter of “blocking” on Tuesday, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne should resort to it by going to the National Assembly in the afternoon, the scene of series defeats for the macronists on votes of budgetary amendments.
This triggering on Wednesday is “probable”, government spokesman Olivier Véran said on Tuesday, after eight days of sometimes heated debates. Nothing “scandalous” in this use of 49.3, tried to defuse on France Inter the boss of the Modem François Bayrou, who recalls that thanks to “this mechanism thought out by the Constitution”, “the government has the means to force the adoption of a text when the oppositions in reality adapt to it”.
Tempers flared again overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday at the Palais-Bourbon, when Nupes deputies criticized the presidential camp for “pretending” to debate “while waiting for 49.3”. Also for the RN vice-president of the National Assembly, Sébastien Chenu, at the microphone of RTL, the government is “quite hypocritical since it makes us debate” while “everything we vote at night in the National Assembly, he will deconstruct it”.
Motion of censure in the pocket for the opposition
Article 49.3 of the Constitution allows him to pass a text without a vote, unless a motion of censure is adopted. The deputies of the Nupes (LFI, PS, EELV, PCF) and of the RN are in the starting blocks to draw theirs as soon as the procedure is activated. But they have almost no chance of bringing down the government, the elected RNs having excluded “a priori” from voting for a text from the Nupes, and vice versa. The motion from the left, which will be presented by the president of the green deputies Cyrielle Chatelain, will be “very open” to rally as much as possible, assured Danièle Obono (LFI), for whom the “presidential minority” shows “its feverishness”.
The Council of Ministers on Wednesday could authorize the government to resort to a second 49.3, for the Social Security draft budget this time. The exchanges are due to resume on Wednesday at 3 p.m. with a debate around the “levy on revenue for the benefit of the EU”. The intervention of the head of government, who must be in the Senate at the start of the afternoon, could only take place afterwards. “A window opens from 5 p.m.,” slips a government source.