The National Assembly largely rejected, on the night of Friday September 29 to Saturday September 30, the first motion of censure targeting Elisabeth Borne this season, leading to the adoption in new reading of the public finance programming law 2023-2027 which will be transmitted to the Senate.
The motion tabled by the left-wing alliance New Ecological and Social Popular Union (Nupes) received 193 votes, out of the 289 needed to bring down the government, an unsurprising outcome in the absence of support from Les Républicains deputies. This eighteenth vote 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.
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.
The Prime Minister targets LFI and the RN
Elisabeth Borne preferred to reserve her barbs for “the two extremes of the hemicycle”, La France insoumise (LFI) and the National Rally (RN). “Demagoguery is your only budgetary course! “, she told these two groups. “You can cry 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 by a minimum of 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 on National Assembly.
“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 attacked the “worst austerity trajectory ever known in this country”, “70 billion euros in savings on the backs of the French by 2027”.
The 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 Nupes”, “its nihilistic ideology” and “its religion of the three “Ds” expenditure, deficit and debt “.
Trivialize 49.3
Rejected by the National Assembly a year ago, this public finance programming bill plans in particular to reduce the public deficit from 4.8% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 to 2.7% in 2027, under 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.
The executive is particularly keen on this law which, he claims, conditions the payment by Brussels to France of 17.8 billion euros over the period 2023-2024, an argument that the left contests. “We cannot take the slightest risk,” Élisabeth Borne insisted on Wednesday in the Assembly, before holding her government accountable for the twelfth time since her arrival in Matignon.
The last time, it was a question of passing the pension reform without a vote in an atmosphere of social and political crisis. A transpartisan motion of censure was then narrowly rejected, by nine votes. The Macronists are working to trivialize 49.3. It is “a tool like any other” in the event of “obstruction” or “relative majority”, “there is no need to demonize it”, underlined the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet.
