Senate passes revamped 2023 budget


Europe 1 with AFP
modified to

5:18 p.m., December 06, 2022

The Senate, with a right-wing majority, adopted a draft budget for 2023 on Tuesday, which it revised with numerous amendments, notably retaining a local business tax that the government wants to abolish. By 197 votes against 108, the senators voted for the entire finance bill, after twenty days of examination at first reading, after having denounced for most of them the trajectory of the public expenses.

Additions and changes from the upper chamber, however, may not be retained. The executive can indeed choose its final copy via the constitutional weapon of 49.3, which it can only trigger before the National Assembly. “It’s the budget of volatility, variability, instability and inflation,” said Senator Jérôme Bascher (LR), comforted by the recent call from the IMF asking the government to clean up the accounts from next year.

“We will refuse the dogma of less taxes”

“We are beyond half of the debt-financed budget,” he lamented, welcoming however that the Senate’s changes have made it possible to “reduce spending and the public deficit”. The centrist Bernard Delcros thus assured that the “tax justice measures adopted by the Senate (…) have made it possible to reduce our deficit by 6.9 billion”.

The course set by the government is to contain the public deficit at 5% of GDP, despite measures such as the “tariff shield” to limit increases in regulated gas and electricity prices to 15%, an increase in teachers or the creation of more than 10,000 civil servant positions, including 3,000 police and gendarmes.

The left has said all the bad things it thinks of the draft budget: “We will refuse the dogma of lower taxes which always benefits the same people, that is to say companies and the richest”, said won the socialist Rémi Féraud. “A budget for nothing”, added the communist Eric Bocquet. The finance bill examined in the Senate had the particularity of having been struck in the Assembly by article 49.3 of the Constitution, already activated twice by the government on this text.

And he risks being again, twice: first when he returns to the deputies on Thursday for a new reading, then on December 15, with a view to the final adoption of the text by Parliament. “I deeply believe that the mark of the Senate will remain in the text which will be adopted at the end of the parliamentary shuttle”, however assured the Minister of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal.

Savings and McKinsey

During the debates on the “expenses” section, the senators voted several savings measures against the government’s opinion. The upper house has approved an amendment that reduces aid for electric cars by 500 million euros, while waiting for the French automotive industry to catch up in this area. It also cut 200 million from development aid.

Less substantial, but symbolic cut: the Senate eliminated three of the five budgeted positions for the National Council for Refoundation (CNR), wanted by Emmanuel Macron and whose senators denounced “uselessness”. At the origin of a report and a bill to better regulate consulting firms, which the National Assembly has not yet been seized with, the Senate returned to the charge with an amendment to the budget which retranscribes the bill already adopted unanimously in mid-October, “to establish real transparency in consulting services”.

The Senate has sometimes banged its fist on the table, rejecting for example the 2023 draft budget for agriculture and forestry, deemed not up to par. In general, the majority of the “territorial chamber” held its line: support communities, taken by the throat by soaring energy prices.

On the planned abolition of the CVAE, a local production tax, the LR group let itself be overtaken by the left and the centrists, and the reform was rejected to the chagrin of the government. The centrist component of the senatorial majority, on the other hand, failed, like the left, to tax the exceptional profits of large companies.



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