Budget rejected unanimously: Parliament votes against itself

According to franceinfo, the National Assembly (the lower house of Parliament) rejected the revenue section of the finance bill on Wednesday, at first reading. Every member voted against, including those from the pro-Macron groups. The site speaks of a first in parliamentary history and quotes a punchy line: "Quelle fin de règne interminable" ("What an interminable end of reign"). So much for the facts. The dispatch says nothing more about each group's motives or the next steps in the procedure, and we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading. A budget nobody wants, not even those who are supposed to carry it: it would be wrong to see this as a mere scheduling hiccup. It is a symptom of a representation that no longer represents much. The presidential camp no longer holds its majority, its erstwhile allies are keeping their distance, and each votes no for reasons that the unanimity itself renders unreadable. A unanimous rejection is not a common front: it is an addition of refusals that sketches no project.

We would like to applaud. But let us keep a cool head. The budget is the heart of the state, that "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie", as the classic formula has it. Taxes, spending, tax breaks: all of it reveals who pays and who collects. That this committee tears itself apart does not shake property relations. The markets, for their part, are waiting for their homework, and we already know that the limit of every manoeuvre is the need to maintain the accumulation of capital. Wednesday's vote is only a first act, and the play risks ending in a compromise tailored to reassure the creditors.

This is where parliamentary reformism shows its weakness. If the institutional left is content to wait for the next concession wrung out behind closed doors, it will do what Luxemburg reproached well-meaning managers for: taking the palliative for the goal. The right question is not "which amendment survived?" but "does this measure restore to workers strength and confidence, or does it lull them to sleep?" A backroom compromise, negotiated between party leaderships, demobilises by design.

The crisis at the top does not mechanically produce consciousness at the bottom. Mass movements are born from unforeseen sparks and teach faster than any party school, but the anger still has to find somewhere to organise: assemblies at workplaces, user committees, trade unions that do not content themselves with reading the Journal officiel (the official gazette). Otherwise, the discrediting of the deputies will benefit those who promise to "restore order", or no one at all.

The elected representatives have therefore voted against the budget. The people, for their part, have not yet voted for anything else, and it is precisely this void that must be filled from below. When the theatre collapses, it is not for the actors to rewrite the play.