Budget: the executive lets the debate rot, the 49.3 waits in the wings

According to Le Figaro, which publishes a "décryptage" on the subject this Wednesday, 4 November, the vote on the revenue side of the budget has once again been postponed at the Assemblée nationale (France's lower house of parliament). The paper also reports that the government is, for now, letting debates bog down in the Palais Bourbon (the Assemblée's seat), before a resort that it considers inevitable to the 49.3 (the constitutional provision allowing a bill to pass without a full vote) or to ordinances (decrees that bypass parliament). The headline reaches for an unflattering image: deputies are supposedly trampling the budget "like toddlers on a sandcastle". What we do not know at this stage: the detail of the measures under discussion, the precise balance of power between groups, the date of any forced passage. The dispatch does not say, and we will not invent it.

What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact. And it starts with a complaint about vocabulary. The image of the toddlers is charming: it turns a political conflict into a sandpit. But a budget is not a beach game. It is the collective, and therefore conflictual, decision about who is taxed, how much, and for which spending. Turning gridlock into a failure of maturity among elected officials erases the interests that clash within it. The business press loves this device: social relations become things, "markets are worried", "the budget isn't moving", as if nobody were holding the joystick. This is commodity fetishism applied to Parliament.

The strategy described, let it rot and then decide, has its logic. If Le Figaro is right, the executive does not need to win the debate: it only needs the debate to wear itself out. The 49.3 or the ordinances would then be presented as a technical necessity when they are in fact a class choice. For the State, let us recall, is not a neutral referee. Taxation, spending, budget rules: these are institutions that first guarantee the conditions under which capital continues to accumulate. The State enjoys a relative autonomy, and the Assemblée remains a terrain of struggle, but that autonomy stops where accumulation is threatened. Hence the interest, for a power without a majority, in reducing public discussion to the bare minimum.

The real stake, which the sandcastle masks, is distribution. Every euro of revenue is extracted from somewhere: from wages, which reproduce the labour force, or from profit, which is unpaid labour appropriated by capital. Every euro of spending benefits someone, public services for some, business aid for others. To say the budget "trampled" is already to suggest it must move fast, and that urgency justifies the economy of deliberation. Note that this urgency never appears when the question is extending debate on tax fraud by the wealthiest.

There remains the democratic question, which we pose without claiming to answer it for want of facts: if the executive has indeed chosen the clock, who decided that Parliament would serve as scenery? The answer, we are told, will come via the 49.3 or the ordinances. We will be watching who ends up footing the bill.