The preparation of a draft budget by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, backed by the bourgeois Socialist Party (PS) confirms the crisis of French democracy, and the complicity of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) with Lecornu and President Emmanuel Macron.
The draft budget now going to the National Assembly tramples underfoot the will of the French people and above all the working class. It continues with austerity, in line with the 2023 pension cuts opposed by 91 percent of the French people, to finance rearmament despite the utter unpopularity of Macron’s call to send troops to Ukraine for war with Russia. The budget depends on the aid of the PS, who has only maintained a presence in the Assembly after collapsing to less than 2 percent of the vote in 2022 thanks to its alliance with Mélenchon.
By openly violating democratic principles, the budget negotiation discredits Macron and the NFP. It opens the path for the far-right National Rally (RN) to consolidate support among working class voters disgusted by Macron, the NFP’s impotent opportunism, and the union bureaucracies’ sellout of mass strikes against the 2023 pension cuts.
In 2026, French military spending is to hit €57.1 billion (apart from pension costs), up 13 percent from 2025, a yearly spending increase of €6.7 billion. This increase, flowing from the Military Programming Law for 2024-2030 and a further infusion of state funds, is largely dedicated to purchasing weapons. This includes Rafale fighters (to bring the total fleet size to 286 jets), drones, artillery and cyberwarfare. It also goes to finance the French nuclear arsenal and ‘exterior operations,’ that is to say, imperialist wars.
Tens of billions of euros are being taken from health, education, pensions and local services in order to finance a rearmament drive and a war policy that has no support in the working class.
Lecornu is slashing jobs and funding in numerous state administrations, eliminating 3,119 positions, and cutting national state subsidies to regional and municipal authorities. Several ministries are seeing their funding slashed across the board—including labor, territorial cohesion, solidarity, and equality of opportunity, with cuts of 2 to 27 percent.
The Social Security budget would cut the financing provided by the national state to €17.5 billion from €23 billion in 2025, by increasing payroll taxes and taxes on supplemental health insurance that will be paid overwhelmingly by working people. The overwhelming majority of the funding for the Social Security system’s €684 billion budget will thus come from payroll taxes paid by workers or from business taxes, not from the state.
As Lecornu leads a government that has only a minority in the National Assembly, he was unable to get a budget passed last autumn. His government’s survival depends on an alliance with factions of the NFP—above all, the bourgeois PS. This alliance is however both extremely fragile and unstable, as all the parties in the Assembly are terrified of a new social explosion of working class anger.
The budget Lecornu presented in October called for €30 billion in social cuts was not adopted for lack of a parliamentary majority. None of the opposition parties dared to openly state their support for Macron’s unpopular measures. To avoid an interruption of the functioning of the state as the new year began, a special emergency transitory law was voted at the end of December, provisionally allocating funds in line with the last year’s budget. The government is therefore still trying to get a 2026 budget, three weeks into the new year.
Both the NFP—that is primarily Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI)—and the RN are trying to distance themselves from the PS’ alliance to Lecornu and the budget of a deeply unpopular government, by repeatedly presenting censure motions against Lecornu. But these motions, presented by parties that also only have minorities in the Assembly, are only impotent gestures.
An LFI motion on January 14 failed because the PS and right-wing The Republicans (LR) groups abstained, as did a later motion from the RN. These motions were not aimed however at attacking the budgetary or military policies of Lecornu and Macron, but the free-trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur bloc signed by Ursula von der Leyen on January 17 in Paraguay.
To avoid a social explosion and being deserted by their own voters, Lecornu and the PS abandoned a few of the most provocative budgetary measures they had proposed last year. These were, however, only cynical maneuvers. The planned doubling of co-pays on medicine is abandoned, but replaced by a tax on supplemental health insurance. Macron’s 2023 pension cut is temporary suspended, but this only means that the retirement age has been raised from 62 and frozen at 63.5, not 64.
Lecornu also symbolically granted a small increase in income taxes on high earners, increased the job bonus for low income families by 50 euros, and extended a program to charge students €1 in university canteens.
But the formulation of a budget with partial support of the PS and allied sections of the trade unions, like the CFDT bureaucracy, does not solve the budget crisis. Friday night, Lecornu spoke to discuss his strategy to avoid a fall of the government amid the already long-delayed budget vote. He brandished the politically explosive threat of imposing the budget without a parliamentary vote, either using Article 49.3 of the constitution, or imposing it by decree.
If Lecornu used the 49.3 thrice—to force adoption of the revenue provisions, spending provisions, and then again overall on the budget—he could face each time a possible censure motion. Imposing the budget by decree depends on Article 47 of the Constitution, which states: ‘If the parliament has not taken a position in 70 days, the provisions of a draft can be placed into legal effect by decree.’ The council of ministers would then approve the budget even if the government were then censured, which the PS has threatened to do.
There is no path for workers to defend democratic principles and oppose austerity and imperialist war in the rotten framework of French parliamentarism. No parliamentary opposition party, LFI and RN included, opposes French and European rearmament, and the RN is openly preparing a draconian, €100 billion austerity plan.
A large majority of the French people has declared its support for blockading the economy via a general strike that would bring down Macron, and against his policies of austerity and war. How can the readiness of the workers to struggle, constantly trodden underfoot, be imposed against a reactionary, anti-democratic ruling elite? The working class must be organized independently of the parties and union bureaucracies of the NFP, on an internationalist perspective to defend democratic and social rights by a revolutionary struggle for workers power and socialism.
The NFP is the principal obstacle to such a struggle. LFI, its leading party, has never launched any appeal to the 8 million people who voted for Mélenchon in 2022, who are concentrated in the working class districts of France’s largest cities, to strike against Macron. It adapted to the union bureaucracies’ sellouts of struggles like those against Macron’s pension cuts, and allied to the PS, a bourgeois party of French imperialism with a decades-long record of anti-worker policies.
As new social explosions are being prepared, in France and internationally, workers will have to act from below, building their own rank-and-file committees. Against the populists of LFI and petty-bourgeois pseudo-left parties that orbit around the NFP, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste will fight to build a Trotskyist revolutionary vanguard, struggling for the transfer of power to such workers organizations of struggle and the building of a socialist society.