00:00Now then, less talk, more action.
00:02The Speaker of the National Assembly is urging French lawmakers to keep it short
00:06in a special debate to get through funding for essential social security.
00:11So, keep it short. The word's from Yael Brown-Pivet.
00:14She's urging brevity and precision in order to get some kind of accord
00:17to ensure pensions and sickness benefits and the like are fully funded.
00:22This as the budget debate is pushed back until next week.
00:26France is now without a financial plan agreed upon
00:29and voted through the National Assembly for the past year.
00:33Antonia Kerrigan's been following today's developments at the National Assembly.
00:38In Parliament, government ministers decried a social model in peril
00:43using the language of the left as they called on their colleagues
00:46to act with responsibility for the public accounts.
00:50This as they defended a social security budget
00:53which left-wing lawmakers, especially from the radical left France unbound,
00:58have decried as a house of horrors.
01:00One saying the founder of the French social model would turn in his grave,
01:04reading it.
01:05The budget in its initial form aims to cut the social security deficit
01:09from ÂŁ23 billion this year to ÂŁ17.5 billion next year.
01:15Now, at certain crucial moments in the government's survival,
01:18the Prime Minister, SĂ©bastien Lecornu, has offered concessions to the left
01:22in the hopes of keeping the Socialist Party on side.
01:26Initially, he offered to suspend the 2023 pension reform
01:30and more recently, he suggested that the freeze of pension and benefits payouts
01:35could be withdrawn from the budget
01:37and that he could find an extra billion euros for public hospitals.
01:41However, these concessions aren't solely in his gift
01:46and with a broadly right-wing parliament,
01:48there's a good chance at least some of them might be rejected.
01:53Moreover, with more than 2,400 amendments to be voted on on this bill
01:59between now and next Tuesday, when the overall text must be put to the vote,
02:05there's a good chance as well that parliament may run down the clock.
02:09What happens then if parliament fails to deliver a budget for the social security?
02:15Well, that remains to be seen.
02:16And, of course, if the budget is not to either side's liking,
02:19the government could face a no-confidence vote.
02:23So, in a sense, all bets are off before they're even on.
02:26Antonia there from the National Assembly.
02:29We need some deeper analysis and I think maybe some simplification.
02:33So we need somebody who understands this story.
02:35Let's bring in Renaud Foucault, who's senior lecturer in economics at Lancaster University.
02:39Renaud, it's always a pleasure to have you with us
02:41and we turn to you when we need that kind of insight
02:43that this story definitely lacks in terms of what is going on
02:47because I think it's hard to understand from outside France
02:49and even sometimes from inside France
02:52as to why the country's in this particular sort of budgetary cul-de-sac.
02:57Explain to us why, in the simplest forms, we're in this position.
03:01Yeah, so believe me, I'm also struggling with the timeline.
03:04But what is very clear is that the system in France,
03:07the parliamentary system, has not been built to have a lot of parties together
03:12co-building a budget.
03:14It's a system that's built on having a majority and an opposition.
03:18And the current government is surviving due to some alliances
03:21between the conservative, the centrist and the social democrats,
03:25but they are outside of government.
03:26So they are trying to push their amendments to the budget,
03:29but they are in the middle of thousands and thousands of other amendments
03:33from the far left, from the far right.
03:35So at the same time, the prime minister wants to show
03:38that he's happy to make an effort because he knows that at any point
03:41the social democrats can pull the trigger and end this government.
03:45But at the same time, he wants to move forward.
03:47And so at the moment what he's doing is that he's regularly giving
03:49like a little candy, a little sweet to the social democrats,
03:53saying that there are not little sweets, there are kind of big concessions.
03:57But at the end, there is no clear view of how they just close this budget.
04:02You cannot simply close a budget by saying we're going to give little things
04:06in terms of cutting the freeze of pension, cutting the pension reform, etc.
04:10So we are at a time where there will be at some point a moment of reckoning.
04:15And this moment of reckoning, either the government goes back
04:18to the good old tradition of 49.3, so saying this is the plan
04:22of the government, final offer, take it or leave it.
04:25But look on, you promised not to do that.
04:28Or they need to find a way to navigate for the first time ever
04:31through building, co-building a budget against institutions
04:34that are not made for that.
04:35And I think that's the call of Yael Bon Privé, to say,
04:38please keep it short, let's try to do something together.
04:4249.3.
04:43I'm reaching for my copy of the French constitution
04:45to reassess my actual understanding of that.
04:48I've got it in my hand now, Renaud.
04:50There we go.
04:51I'll show everybody I'll carry that with me just to make sure I'm clear on these things.
04:54So clearly, it seems that Le Conu is between, sorry,
04:57the Prime Minister, SĂ©bastien Le Conu, is between a rock and a hard place here
05:01because, as you pointed out, the political stalemate
05:04is making any kind of movement on this incredibly difficult
05:07because, as we remind people,
05:09no one party in charge in the French National Assembly.
05:13No one party in charge.
05:15And so even for those votes on the budget,
05:17so at the same time, Macron,
05:19Macron Le Conu, wants to show to the conservative,
05:22Les RĂ©publicains,
05:23that he's still serious about being mostly a centrist figure,
05:26but he needs to give concession to the social democrats.
05:29So he needs to find the exact right number of members of parliament
05:32that abstain so that the far left and the left can vote their amendments
05:37and some of them pass.
05:39But on some other that they want to block,
05:40such as the wealth tax,
05:42then they need to say, okay, we all vote again.
05:44So this is like very, very tedious.
05:46And again, this is not what French democracy,
05:49the Fifth Republic, has been built on.
05:51It's been built on, you have a big group,
05:53they agree on something,
05:55and it is approved by parliament.
05:56And you know, there are small details that are discussed in parliament.
05:59And this is, I think, the original sin of this government,
06:02is that if the social democrats were on board,
06:04if they were part of the government,
06:06if there was an actual standard coalition
06:08between centrist, right-wing, and social democrats,
06:11they could have started together by a compromise.
06:14And that compromise, they would have voted it through as one bloc.
06:18But the problem is that they didn't do that
06:19because the social democrats are one foot inside,
06:22one foot outside.
06:23And this is, I think,
06:24what is creating the absolutely unmanageable situation at the moment.
06:28We have a government federal shutdown in the United States
06:31at this present moment in time,
06:32and that means that some federal workers aren't getting paid,
06:35some benefits aren't going through.
06:38Is that likely to happen in France, Renaud?
06:40Would that be a situation that French workers would have to put out with?
06:43No, no, no.
06:46So the U.S. system is a very unique one.
06:48Most democracies, parliamentary democracies,
06:51have systems in which they can postpone
06:52and say we continue just as before for a bit longer.
06:56The only problem with France is if the market starts to panic at some point
07:00and you need to have an intervention.
07:02But what you will notice is that at the moment,
07:03the market don't really seem to panic,
07:05seem to be kind of priced in that.
07:07Le Cornu, he has said it loud and clear.
07:09I'm not here to do anything meaningful.
07:12I'm just here to survive and to somehow push the government alive
07:16until basically the presidential election.
07:18And I think that's where we are right now.
07:20No one is panicking.
07:21There will be some form of postponement.
07:23And I guess, unfortunately, a sense of hopelessness
07:26that this is the failure of the second Macron mandate.
07:31France has not been able to manage itself
07:33without a parliamentary democracy in any meaningful way.
07:36Renaud Foucault of Lancaster University,
07:40senior lecturer in economics.
07:42And as we heard, expert on how things work here in France,
07:44or rather this present moment in time, don't work.
07:46Renaud, thank you for your insight.
07:48Always appreciate it.
07:49You've really explained it in a manner that I can understand,
07:52which I think is a good start
07:53because I count myself as a very ordinary person
07:55who's got a very fortunate job
07:57that I can ask people like you, Renaud,
07:58the good questions to explain what is going on.
08:00Thank you, sir, for being with us here on France 24.
08:03We're watching, of course, with our teams at the Assembly
08:06and our teams in the studio
08:07and our experts all over the place
08:09to find out what happens here with the French budget.
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