Will France call another election by 2026?
MetaculusJul 28, 2024
French Senate Passes 2025 Budget
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Above: France's Prime Minister Francois Bayrou delivers a speech at the Senate, French upper house parliament, in Paris on Jan. 15, 2025. Image copyright: Bertrand Guay/Contributor/AFP via Getty Images
The Facts
France's upper house of parliament, the Sénat, passed the 2025 budget in a 219-107 vote on Thursday as most senators from centrist and center-right political groups backed the legislation.
The Constitutional Council still has to approve the budget before Pres. Emmanuel Macron can sign it into law after a two-month delay that disturbed markets and toppled the short-lived government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
The budget aims to reduce the public deficit at 5.4% of GDP through "an unprecedented" combination of €30B in spending cuts and €20B in tax increases, Finance Minister Éric Lombard said.
The Spin
Narrative A
The 2025 budget reflects Bayrou's approach of balancing fiscal responsibility with social welfare, as he seeks to reduce the deficit while protecting essential services. Unlike his predecessor, the prime minister has taken a pragmatic route to finally deliver the long-delayed budget.
Narrative B
With taxes set to go up and spending cuts still insufficient, the 2025 budget definitively marks the end of Macron's pro-growth reform era — and the president is ultimately to blame for that. After all, it was him who called the snap election that threw the country into a political deadlock.
