For weeks, French MPs and senators have been bogged down in Byzantine negotiations on the budget for 2026 and the social security financing plan for the coming months. With the end of the year, the deadline for a final vote is fast approaching, but there is still no satisfactory reform in sight.
The future and credibility of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who has already resigned once, were hanging in the balance pending the vote scheduled for Tuesday, December 9th, on the second reading of the social security financing plan.
Lecornu wanted to take a gamble and try to get the social security budget bill passed in the Assembly without a full majority. He needed 210 votes. He secured the support of the Socialists by promising the much-demanded suspension of the controversial pension reform, exposing himself to the risk of being abandoned by his own camp: on the centre-right, Les Républicains (LR) and Horizons, the party of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, refused to support a budget that, in their view, made too many concessions to the Left.
On the evening of December 8th, Philippe asked the MPs in his group to abstain, not wishing to “blindly support a budget that suspends pension reform and worsens the deficit.”
Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the LR MPs, also asked his MPs to abstain—in order to signal his disapproval without being accused of blocking the bill by voting against it. To justify his decision, he cited a “lack of budgetary seriousness,” the introduction of ‘new taxes’ and, of course, the suspension of pension reform, which he opposes.
The RN’s position was much more clear-cut: Marine Le Pen has warned that her MPs would vote against it. Similarly, but for opposite reasons, Mathilde Panot, leader of La France Insoumise MPs (LFI), has stated her categorical opposition to the social security budget bill.
The vote on the second reading of the bill was therefore expected to be extremely close. The atmosphere of tension was palpable in the National Assembly, where dirty tricks and rumours are rife. The prime minister announced his intention to take legal action after discovering that an interest group allegedly attempted to exert pressure on the vote during negotiations between the government and the Green Party by spreading false rumours about the energy policy planned for the coming years. To increase pressure on MPs and secure their votes, the deputy minister for public accounts, David Amiel, threatened that the deficit would increase by €30 billion if the proposed budget was not adopted and the planned savings were not made.
The bill was finally passed on the evening of December 9th by 247 votes to 234. The suspension of the pension reform, sought by the Socialists, should therefore be definitively enacted—even if a final round of negotiations with the Senate is planned before the final adoption on December 16th.
The prime minister, who sensed the wind of change, welcomed the spirit of compromise shown by MPs: “Compromise is not a slogan: it allows us to move forward in the general interest,” he said on X following the announcement of the vote results.
Lucidity and humility remain essential. Even if adopted, the social security budget, approved by the National Assembly on Tuesday evening, and the state budget, still under review in the Senate, will not be enough to turn public finances around. The convergence of opposition from the left with LFI and from the right with the RN, added to the abstention of many centrist MPs, implicitly proves the total lack of direction of the project. LFI deplores measures that cut back on health care spending and workers’ rights, while the RN deplores new taxes and the refusal to make drastic cuts in certain areas of state spending.
As many economists point out, the underlying problem remains unresolved, and these lilliputian negotiations on tax and rate adjustments, which the French have given up trying to understand, will not change the situation: “The problem, for the moment, is political, not economic, even if uncertainty is hampering growth. The fundamentals of the French economy have not changed,” says Mathieu Plane, an economist at the French Economic Observatory (OFCE). He deplores “the political inability to adopt a programme to restore public finances with a truly coherent strategy, rather than a pile-up of measures that are more about tax increases than spending cuts.”
