Budget 2027: €28 billion more, and austerity sweating it out

According to Le Figaro, members of the National Assembly's finance committee voted, as part of the 2027 budget, for some €28 billion in additional spending. The paper notes that they were generous with the envelope set aside for ecology, that they rejected the savings proposed and that, in doing so, they are widening the deficit "without counting". The details of the line items and the resulting exact size of the deficit are not in the material available to us. Moreover, this committee vote is only a stage: the bill still has many other hurdles to clear.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First point: the phrase "without counting" is a small masterpiece. It presumes that spending is an impulse and saving a virtue. Yet a budget is a series of decisions about who pays and who receives. When one says that "the deficit is widening", the figure is given a life of its own, as if nobody had voted for it. This sleight of hand has a name: the fetishism of the commodity, which turns political choices into natural forces. The deputies did count, very precisely. They simply counted differently from Le Figaro.

Second point, more structural. Marxists describe the modern state as the manager of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, while granting it a relative autonomy: it is also a terrain of struggle. A committee vote that unsettles budgetary discipline may be one illustration of that. But the limit is well known: the state must guarantee that capital continues to accumulate. That is why ecology will be tolerated so long as it looks like a market to be subsidised, and viewed with suspicion as soon as it looks like a constraint on profits. Lacking detail, we cannot know which of these two logics governs the €28 billion voted.

Third point: austerity. When savings are demanded, one must ask which ones, and at whose expense. Cutting public spending often means cutting services, jobs and civil servants' pay, and so weighing on those who live by their work. And higher unemployment, a convenient side effect, reminds everyone that a reserve army waits at the door, which cools wage ambitions. Yet one rarely sees an anxious editorial about the deficit created by exemptions from social contributions or aid to businesses, even though profits, for their part, do not depend on the good mood of the market.

We will therefore wait to see what the plenary session does with this vote, and above all who, in the end, will foot the bill. For a deficit is also a claim: someone holds it, and collects interest. That may be the one budgetary question that "rigour" prefers not to ask.