The hard part starts now. Outvoted by the opposition on several occasions during the examination of the Covid-19 bill in the National Assembly, Tuesday July 12, the government is preparing for a new showdown, this time over power. of purchase. It is indeed on Monday 18 that the examination in the Hemicycle of the two texts devoted to it begins – the bill for purchasing power on Monday, and the amending budget which the deputies will consider on Thursday. With a non-zero risk that the scenario is reproduced identically on one or more government measures.
This “purchasing power package” brings together more than 20 billion euros of measures intended to relieve households penalized by growing inflation, with various measures, new or simply extended, such as the tripling of the Macron bonus, the revaluation of social benefits and the point of index of the civil servants, the suppression of the royalty, the payment of a check of 100 euros for the re-entry, the progressive extinction of the rebate of 18 centimes at the pump, or the new more targeted check which will take over after the summer. It is also the first text with a strong political stake in the five-year term, since it carries several key measures from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign.
Determined to exercise their new powers in the Assembly, where they snatched an absolute majority from Emmanuel Macron in June, the oppositions have multiplied warnings in recent weeks, threatening not to vote on the text if it does not incorporate not some of their proposals. Their main battleground: the price of fuel, which they want to see lowered further, either by blocking prices on the left or by a tax exemption on the right. The executive has so far firmly opposed the tracks of the opposition, brandishing their too high cost – lowering taxes to bring fuel down to 1.50 euros as the right wants would cost 50 billion euros, hammers the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, who has for days castigated a “financial madness”.
Lively debates in committees
A one-off coalition of opposition deputies is not excluded, we admit within the executive, scalded by the thwarted vote on the bill on the health crisis. “Even if there are few subjects on which the oppositions can meet, we see that there is a form of coalition, of community of interests which emergesadmits a minister. We collectively have to get used to the idea that we are going to be beaten on amendments. » The majority is, moreover, temporarily weakened by the absence of about twenty elected officials – the ministers whose alternates do not yet sit.
You have 60.8% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.