Budget: the Senate validates the “special law” in committee, with a view to its adoption on Wednesday

The Senate gave its first green light in committee on Tuesday to the “special law”, a budgetary palliative urgently submitted to Parliament after the censorship of the Barnier government, paving the way for its final adoption on Wednesday in the upper house.

Unsurprisingly, the senators of the Finance Committee approved this almost unprecedented bill, authorizing the executive to levy taxes and borrow to finance the State and Social Security, pending the vote of a formal budget for 2025.

“This special law gives everything the state needs to carry out its essential functions in early 2025, but nothing more. It must be completed as quickly as possible” with a budget, said the senator.

Attempts at amendments

The left, a minority in the Senate, will nevertheless try to introduce amendments on Wednesday to index the income tax scale to inflation, but they could be declared inadmissible, as in the National Assembly where President Yaël Braun- Pivet relied on an opinion from the Council of State. The latter considers in fact that the special law is not the appropriate text for this indexation, unlike a real finance bill.

The deputies Charles de Courson (Liot) and Éric Coquerel (LFI), the pair who manage the budget in the National Assembly, propose another option: that this measure as well as other consensual tax measures be grouped together in another draft law from January.

The senatorial majority, an alliance of the right and the center, opts instead for the budgetary debates to resume where they left off at the beginning of December at the time of the censorship of the government of Michel Barnier, without tabling a new one. finance bill.

“The state cannot afford to erase everything, throw away the budget and make a new one. We risk having nothing before the end of March,” Jean-François Husson told an AFP journalist, believing that the budget can “be corrected” without having to start from scratch.