Emmanuel Macron’s government gave tax breaks for France’s wealthiest while counting on purchase taxes paid by ordinary consumers. Now saying it has a budget hole to fill, his administration is again expecting working-class people to pick up the bill.
by Marlon Ettinger
Part 1
President Emmanuel Macron picked François Bayrou as France’s new prime minister earlier this month, despite his lack of any parliamentary majority. Bayrou’s appointment on December 13 came just over a week after his predecessor Michel Barnier’s government was felled by a no-confidence vote proposed by the Left and joined by the far right, after Barnier tried to force through his budget without having the numbers in the National Assembly.
The most likely outcome now is that Bayrou, who comes from a party called the Democratic Movement, will reimpose last year’s budget by decree. The National Assembly has already assented to continuing last year’s budget by an emergency vote. France’s in many ways undemocratic constitution gives Bayrou the power to keep the ball rolling — perpetuating a budget that was originally passed without a vote, using the controversial constitutional article 49.3.
The dominant narrative that justifies this soft rule of financial dictatorship is that France faces a financial crisis, and that an imminent disaster is looming. Opponents of France’s existing welfare provisions say that the budgetary situation is an inescapable fact that requires that the whole system be overhauled. Its defenders say that the crisis was manufactured in recent years by Macron’s governments with the goal of undermining the social model — in effect, that Macron is dropping termites into the walls then putting on a show about how the whole house needs to be pulled down.
They say that looking at the destination of revenue from the value-added tax (VAT), which consumers pay on all purchases, proves that the narrative about France’s dire fiscal situation is fundamentally phony.
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