BarcelonaSince he was appointed prime minister, the budgets have thrown Sébastien Lecornu into a tailspin, to the point that difficulties in finding bridges with partners led him to resign briefly in October. After this brief resignation, and pushed by President Emmanuel Macron, he took the reins of government again, assuring that he would do “everything in his power to provide France with a budget before the end of the year and respond to the problems of the daily lives of his compatriots”.
A week before the end of the year, and in the last parliamentary session before the holidays, the French prime minister has seen defeat and has had to settle for the scraps: the extension of the 2025 budget. The National Assembly has approved this Tuesday a special law – presented on Monday by the executive – which allows the government to continue collecting taxes and allocate funds to local authorities, and which authorizes the State to borrow from the markets and pay the contribution of France in the budget of the European Union. In short, it allows the operation of minimums to be maintained before parliamentary activity resumes in January and Lecornu can negotiate with the opposition the accounts for 2026.
The text, which consists of three articles, was approved unanimously: 496 votes in favor and none against. The next step will be to approve it in the Senate, which should do so this evening.
“The least bad solution”
The government sees this option as “the least bad solution”, as it will have a minimum cost of 12,000 million euros. But the extension puts new investments and planned projects on hold until new budgets are adopted, such as subsidies for housing renovation and for winegrowers, the hiring of teachers and judicial sector workers, or tenders, many of which were supposed to finance projects related to the commitments of the 2030 Agenda.
Lecornu, the sixth prime minister that France has had in three years, faces the challenge of getting a new budget for 2026 with a very weak parliamentary base, which rests on occasional support from the traditional right and the socialists in exchange for concessions. The opposition already forced him to back down with the pension reform in October – the star measure of Macron’s mandate – and France Insubmissa has already warned that it will raise a motion of censure like the one that brought down his predecessor, Michel Barnier, if Lecornu thinks of approving the budgets unilaterally, through the controversial article 49.3. Budgets that will be even more difficult to negotiate considering that France has pledged to increase defense spending and reduce the deficit to 5% of GDP.
