Gérard Larcher took out his calculator. The President of the Senate is categorical: never before has the upper house spent so much time debating a budgetary text: 162 hours in total, or 12 more than last year! The deleterious conditions of design of this budget, rejected in the Assembly, interrupted by censorship, are not unrelated to this result.
Unsurprisingly, senators adopted the finance bill for 2025 by a comfortable majority of 217 votes for and 105 votes against. A text written by the Barnier government, taken up by François Bayrou, and amended by the right-wing majority in the Senate. Senator LR Christine Lavarde had fun with it. “It is neither the budget of Michel Barnier, nor that of François Bayrou, it is that of the Senate! » she congratulated herself.