Budget 2027: revenue measures rejected unanimously, but the class question still stands

According to Libération, the revenue section of the 2027 finance bill was rejected unanimously by deputies on Wednesday evening. The paper describes a "festival of posturing" by the government and the parliamentary groups alike, in an autumn when the political camps are counting down to the presidential election. Libération speaks of a game of roles in which everyone comes out a loser.

What the report does not say, and what we do not yet know: which specific tax measures were examined, which amendments were defended, and why each group voted against. A unanimous rejection can add up to contradictory refusals: some find the text too lenient on capital income, others find it too greedy. The same ballot, opposite motives. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

First remark: calling this "theatre" is comfortable, but theatre has a purpose. A budget is a distribution. Revenue is the art of deciding what share of the wealth produced by labour will be taken, and from whom. Wages, consumption, profits, property: each line is a class choice, even when it dresses itself up as arithmetic. Most often, the levy does not fall on what is first extracted from workers, surplus value; we argue over the crumbs.

Second remark: the state is not a neutral arbiter, but neither is it a simple attorney. It enjoys a relative autonomy, and Parliament is a field of confrontation. Yet its room for manoeuvre is bounded by one requirement: that the accumulation of capital must continue. When debates tighten around the deficit, "credibility" or investor confidence, that constraint can be heard speaking. Hence the paradox of the spectacle: everyone is agitated, yet the real range of tolerable options remains narrow.

Third remark, on vocabulary. Commentators love to say that "the markets are waiting" or that "the budget is blocked", as if these entities had a will of their own. This is the fetishism of the commodity applied to budget policy: we give the figures an agent and take it away from people. Behind "the deficit demands" stand decisions taken by governments, banks and large holders of government debt.

As for the presidential countdown, it explains the staging, not the substance. Each camp wants to reach 2027 with a narrative, not with a tax. What remains to be seen is what the unanimous rejection will produce: the back-and-forth between the two chambers, any recourse to other procedures, none of this is detailed in the report. Meanwhile, those who live on their wages have one certainty: their share will be decided somewhere in this uproar, and they have no seat in the Assemblée to follow it live.