With their “tax justice” proposals acclaimed on the left, but rejected by the government, the MoDem deputies cultivate their singularity during the examination of the budget, even if it means upsetting their Macronist allies. In the Assembly, the left no longer has enough kind words for the leader of the MoDem group Jean-Paul Mattei. “He’s a revolutionary notary!”, launched the communist Sébastien Jumel in the hemicycle. “It’s the InsouMattei”, says LFI elected official Hadrien Clouet of him.
The taxation of large companies in the crosshairs
Because like last year, Jean-Paul Mattei looked at the taxation of the largest companies. After having pleaded in vain to tax “superdividends”, this year he suggested a tax on buybacks of their own shares by large firms. A provision adopted in committee, but dismissed by the government when it triggered its first 49.3 on the 2024 draft budget.
“Tax justice is not a whim of President Mattei. It is a necessary subject in the current period. A little flexibility in relation to the totems while respecting the overall trajectory does not hurt,” defends the MP Maud Gatel, general secretary of the party.
Same standoff over housing and the “Airbnb tax niche”. The deputy for the 2nd constituency of Pyrénées-Atlantiques did not mince his words after the government arbitrations on the reduction of the tax deduction for the rental of furnished tourist accommodation. The measure “seems insufficient and poorly targeted,” he said. “We hope that this article will evolve during the parliamentary shuttle.”
Break with Macronie?
At Renaissance, we regularly get annoyed by the “will to exist” of MoDem and its boss François Bayrou. It is “not in an ascending phase” but “the Modems, they are tough, they want everything. Mattei, he is tightening the rope on the budget”, complains a Macronist parliamentarian.
On the immigration bill, expected in December in the Assembly, six centrist deputies also signed, with the left, the forum initiated by the Renaissance deputy to defend the article on the regularization of undocumented workers, of which the right does not doesn’t want to hear about it.
“I don’t have the feeling of putting the majority in difficulty, it’s just a way of recalling what the initial promise was,” assumes Elodie Jacquier-Laforge, one of the centrist signatories.
In the hemicycle, a tormented relationship
In the National Assembly, the MoDem was also entitled to loud applause from the left during the debate on the situation in the Middle East. After castigating the “terrorist aggression” of Hamas, “constituting a generalized war crime and backed by a discourse of an assumed genocidal nature”, the dean of the centrist group, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, president of the Foreign Affairs Committee , wondered about the genesis of the situation in the Middle East.
He particularly pointed to the “rupture introduced” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who “acted as if the Palestinian problem belonged to the past”, but also “the historic share of responsibility” of the United States, particularly under Donald Trump .
Some Renaissance elected officials did not applaud, while the Horizons deputy Jérémie Patrier-Leitus denounced a “scandalous” intervention and the elected representative LR Meyer Habib, close to Benjamin Netanyahu, was indignant at a “Munich speech”. Taking the floor again, Jean-Louis Bourlanges claimed his comments were “balanced”: those of a “centrist in all his forms”.