France, Lecornu's spending plan approved

2025-12-10 08:46:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

French Prime Minister Le Corneille can breathe a sigh of relief after the National Assembly approved his spending plans with 13 votes in favor. Le Corneille has been in office for three months and has resigned once.

France's National Assembly narrowly approved the social security budget on Tuesday, bringing major relief to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who aims to finalize the government's spending plan for 2026 before the end of the year.

The lower house of the French Parliament supported the measure, which includes the suspension of a pension reform, by 247 votes to 234. Lecornu thanked what he called a "responsible majority."

The budget will now go back to the Senate before returning to the lower house. Lecornu has struggled to get parliament to approve the budget since taking office in September, but concessions he made to President Emmanuel Macron’s spending cuts to appease the center-left Socialists risk alienating his centrist and conservative allies. If the bill had failed, it would have left a 30 billion euro (about $35 billion) gap in funding for healthcare, pensions and social welfare, and would have thrown Lecornu’s own position into doubt.

The change in the retirement age is postponed again in the latest draft law

The main change in the social security budget is the increase in the retirement age, which President Macron has been calling for for years.

Previous proposals to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 — reforms which were first introduced in 2023 and which would still place France among the most generous countries in Europe or the G7 — have been shelved again.

The intended change will be suspended until 2027, after the next presidential election, meaning Macron will not have achieved his goal of reforming France's outdated pension system during his two terms in office.

When asked whether the plan would be approved before the parliamentary debate and subsequent vote, which began at 4:00 p.m. local time, Budget Minister Amelie de Montchalin told BFM TV: "I can't say."

She also said the government could commit additional funds to finance hospitals in the hope of winning the support of hardline political parties, such as the Green Party bloc.

Minority government dependent on support

Both populist parties, the right and the left, two of the largest in a divided parliament, are expected to oppose the spending plans.

This would force Lecornu, a Macron loyalist, to rely on the overwhelming majority of the remaining groups in parliament to ensure the bill's passage.

But his efforts to win the support of the Socialists, the traditional center-left political force in France, risk alienating the center-right Republicans and centrist parties like Horizon, whose members say Lecornu has made too many compromises as France struggles to control its debt.

The government aims to reduce France's budget deficit, already one of the highest in Europe, to 5% of GDP next year. By comparison, Germany's was 2.8% in 2024.

France in crisis: Macron faces growing anger

But this has been a challenge for years, and has become almost impossible since the 2024 snap elections called by Macron, which further weakened the position of the President and his allies.

Le Cornouaille is the third prime minister since those elections. He has only been in office since September. And he has already resigned once, a few weeks after taking office, but Macron asked him to come back and try to pass the budget before the deadline expired and emergency spending measures had to be taken.

Macron's last four prime ministers have lasted less than a year. The previous two didn't even last two years./ DW