France’s Parti Socialiste abstained in a confidence vote this week, allowing Emmanuel Macron’s allies to push through an austerity budget. Even as the president’s popularity flounders, the establishment center-left chose to prop up his rule.
French premier François Bayrou forced approval of his 2025 budget this week, using a special constitutional power known as Article 49.3 to adopt two financing packages without a vote by the lower house. Avoiding the fate of his predecessor Michel Barnier, who failed in December in a similar bid to use this constitutional article, Bayrou comfortably beat back two no-confidence votes. While he leads a minority government not supported by a majority of legislators, in this case it benefited from the abstention of both the center-left Parti Socialiste and the far-right bloc grouped behind Marine Le Pen. With the upper house’s green light on Thursday, the budget awaits final approval from the Constitutional Council before entering into effect.
The lack of any clear majority in the National Assembly meant that the spending cuts stipulated in the budget are relatively modest, with the main chunk of 2025 savings coming from temporary windfall tax increases. In the lower house, Bayrou’s coalition, which brings together the Macronists and the center-right Les Républicains, faces off against the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and a far-right alliance behind Le Pen, with each positioning itself for possible fresh parliamentary elections this summer. But as the call to reduce deficits increasingly sets the parameters of public debate, this week’s votes mark the clearing of a first hurdle in what government officials are presenting as a long austerity campaign.
“The budget that we’ll adopt today is only the beginning of the beginning of the start of the work we’re going to do,” said Bayrou on Wednesday, shortly before the vote on the two no-confidence motions. Having compared France’s budgetary situation to a “Himalayan” challenge in December, Bayrou called deficit reduction a “moral” necessity in his January 14 general policy speech.
The government’s stated aim is to reduce the 2025 deficit to 5.4 percent of GDP, down from around 6 percent in 2024. That’s still well above the European Union’s benchmark of 3 percent, which the government claims to be able to return to by 2029. Over the coming year, the state services and programs hit by cuts include the culture ministry, higher education and research, and local municipalities, with state-funded environmental investments slated to decrease by as much as 14 percent. Among the sources of new funds are a windfall tax on corporations with revenues over €1 billion — a one-off for 2025 that’s expected to bring in just shy of €8 billion — and a similar one-year hike in the income tax for the highest-earning individuals and households.
Just about every force from the Macronists to the far right has forsworn talk of permanent tax increases. France’s corporate lobby, meanwhile, has been up in arms over the minor (and temporary) levies imposed in this year’s budget and denounces a tax code that claims the highest percentage of national GDP among OECD countries. For now, however, the parliamentary math wasn’t there for a full offensive against public expenditures and services.
The “Opposition”
Wednesday’s failed no-confidence vote buys some breathing room for the divisive coalition grouped under President Emmanuel Macron, who appointed Bayrou as prime minister in mid-December. Since the snap elections to the National Assembly last summer, which further weakened his allies’ position as a minority in parliament, Macron has been determined to keep government in the hands of a centrist-conservative bloc that would avert any reversal of his pro-business agenda. In the president’s ideal world, elements of the center left would lend their forces to that effort, as Macron spelled out in a public letter last July following his camp’s defeat in the snap elections.
That last wish was in part granted with the failure of the no-confidence motions against Bayrou. For this marked the fracturing of the Nouveau Front Populaire bloc bringing together the four parties to the left of the government’s coalition. In a break from the alliance, the Parti Socialiste was the only party in the NFP to abstain from the no-confidence motions, with all sixty-six MPs in its caucus opting not to take part in the vote. Since a no-confidence vote relies on the majority of all MPs (and not just the majority who vote) actively censuring the government, any MPs who abstain are effectively assenting to the government remaining in place.
Fending off criticism from his left-wing partners, the Parti Socialiste’s main leader, Olivier Faure, has sought to portray the party’s position on the budget as a matter of pragmatic necessity. “We’re attached to the general interest of the country,” Faure said on France Inter radio this Tuesday, explaining that his party remained in the “opposition” despite its decision not to vote for Bayrou’s ouster.
“We’re far from saying this is a good budget,” Parti Socialiste MP Arthur Delaporte told Jacobin. Yet Delaporte argues that the concessions his party was able to win in talks with Bayrou are “tangible” steps and justified a change in position. The MP points to Bayrou’s cancellation of layoffs of some four thousand teachers in the public school system, five hundred saved jobs at the state’s unemployment agency, and investments in the hospital system as proof that this is a better budget deal than the one tabled by Barnier and voted down in December.
Bayrou’s government also survived thanks to the abstention of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which opted for de-escalation out of fear of alienating business interests and more mainstream conservative voters. Le Pen didn’t even take the stand in the National Assembly to explain the party’s position, leaving it to a low-ranking lieutenant who used the pulpit to denounce France’s “colossal growth” of expenditures and the tax code’s “racket” on “producers” in the economy. Speaking on Europe-1 radio the day before the vote, the Rassemblement National’s party president, Jordan Bardella, argued that the “French would not stand to gain from a new round of instability.”
Parti Socialiste officials also point to what they call Bayrou’s “change in method” relative to Barnier, namely the new premier’s desire to present the center left as the focus of his budget talks. But Bayrou has also diligently worked to keep Le Pen and her allies on board. For the far right, the budget includes concessions like cuts to international development aid as well as a spending freeze on a health care program to cover undocumented migrants’ medical expenses — a minor expenditure item that has become one of the hard right’s favorite causes. In late January, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau also issued an administrative order to tighten the pathway for undocumented immigrants seeking official work and residency status.
With the budget now approved, the Parti Socialiste is expected to submit its own no-confidence motion, which would target Bayrou for his support of Retailleau’s immigration order and the prime minister’s claims that France was experiencing migratory “submersion.” The Parti Socialiste’s no-confidence motion has little chance of passing, however, given that the Rassemblement National can reliably be expected to oppose it. NFP critics have called this a late attempt for the Parti Socialiste to save face, in full expectation that the vote will fail.
Irreconcilable?
Junior partners in the left-wing alliance, the Écologistes and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) are trying to downplay talk of any formal split in the NFP brought about by the Parti Socialiste’s tacit support for Bayrou’s budget. “Does this mean the end of the NFP as some people seem to shouting? I don’t think so,” Marine Tondelier, national secretary of the Écologistes, told RTL radio on Wednesday.
The Parti Socialiste’s move has reignited its rift with the France Insoumise, however, with the NFP’s largest party denouncing yet another “betrayal” by the center-left establishment. The NFP’s ranks have been “reduced by one party,” said France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “The PS, or at least the dominant wing of the party, is rallying to the bourgeois center,” Danièle Obono, a France Insoumise MP from Paris, told Jacobin. “What does ‘stability’ really mean for them?” she continued. “It means attacks against migrants, preserving the economic status quo, and runaway inequality.”
Not voting for another chaotic government collapse certainly appealed to parts of the Parti Socialiste caucus. But for the right-wing faction in the party, always opposed to ties with France Insoumise, winning the party’s abstention on the Bayrou budget was more about distancing themselves from Mélenchon’s wing of the Left.
The Parti Socialiste has pushed back against France Insoumise’s efforts to bring down Bayrou, criticizing this as a strategy focused on forcing Macron’s resignation and snap presidential elections. Delaporte, the MP for the Parti Socialiste, claims that its rightful place is still with its NFP partners. “I have never believed in the idea that there are two, ‘irreconcilable’ lefts,” he said. But he also took aim at what he deems France Insoumise’s “constant strategy of brinksmanship, which contributes to their growing isolation not only in the political space but in society more broadly.”
Yet eight months after the Parti Socialiste agreed to a program for full “rupture” with Macronism, it’s not hard to hear the center-left party singing a different tune. “The framework here is austerity,” Delaporte willingly conceded of the 2025 financing law. “But the economy was showing signs of stalling,” he said in his party’s defense, pointing to the vocal concerns from business owners, municipalities, and associations dependent on public contracts and new credits needing a full-fledged budget.
For Obono, that type of argument has the Parti Socialiste surrendering to the government’s “blackmail.” In late December, the National Assembly approved a special financing law to renew the expenditures and revenues in the 2024 budget. While that legislation is explicitly intended as a temporary holdover until a full budget can be adopted, France insoumise argued that it could have been used as a stand-in budget amid the paralysis in parliament. It has accused the government of going out of its way to not disperse the totality of the funds made available by that law. “We had a budget,” says Obono of the special financing law. “And it was far better than the budget that Bayrou has now imposed.”
With his latest victory, Bayrou has taken to imagining his government’s survival into 2026 and beyond, although many still count on a new dissolution of the National Assembly this year, and possibly as soon this summer. For the NFP, that means overcoming the divisions that have broken out into plain view this week. It’s the Left’s own “Himalaya,” you might say.