Brussels – In France, it will be the second consecutive Christmas without a budget law. Today, 19 December, the Joint Parliamentary Committee met to seek an agreement on the manoeuvre. The meeting lasted only about thirty minutes and yielded no results. In short, Paris will have to wait until 2026 before having an economic plan. For the Prime Minister
Sébastien Lecornu
, there are now two options left: to ask for the confidence of the chamber to force his hand and pass his proposal, or to ask for the approval of a special law to ensure the continuity of tax collection.
Not that the Elysée Palace was expecting much better news, but the failure, in any case, once again shows France’s political difficulties. The Prime Minister, who has only been in office since October, has only to acknowledge defeat: “I regret it, our compatriots do not deserve to suffer the consequences of this stalemate. The next move is to bring together “starting on Monday the main political leaders to consult them on the way forward to protect the French people and find the conditions for a solution.”
While political forces are discussing an agreement among themselves, the French public debt is hitting new highs. This was communicated by the French statistical institute (INSEE) with diabolical timing. The INSEE released data on the French financial situation just hours after the committee’s flop. The new figures show that at the end of the third quarter of 2025, the debt reached €3,482.2 billion, amounting to 117 per cent of GDP. In the eurozone, only Greece and Italy do worse, with debt-to-GDP ratios above 135 per cent.
An escape route for the prime minister would be to use Article 49.3 of the Constitution. This procedure would allow the law to pass without a vote of the Houses. Lecornu, however, is supposed to have already entered into an agreement with the Socialist Party (PS), which would undertake not to censor the budget. Some PS figures promote this idea, but Lecornu does not seem willing to risk the chamber test.
The hypothesis of stalling is more likely. Last year, the executive of François Bayrou only managed to approve the budget in February. Bayrou pushed through a special rule to guarantee the functioning of the economic machine beyond 31 December, replicating the 2024 manoeuvre. Bayrou’s successor seems set to copy the strategy. According to the Parisian newspaper Le Monde, “the approval process is expected to be rapid. The text could be examined over the weekend by the Council of Ministers, then on Monday by the National Assembly, on Tuesday by the Senate, before being promulgated immediately afterwards.”
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
