Not One Vote For: France's Budget Goes Back to the Government's First Draft

1. Nobody's budget

The unanimous vote was the last of three defeats in a single sitting. Deputies first threw out article 57, the balance article that sets the budget's bottom line, by 157 votes to 86; apart from two deputies, only the government's camp and the Droite républicaine backed it. A government amendment to the opening article, which sets out the deficit path, then fell by 168 to 80. On the final vote the government's own deputies joined everyone else, and the revenue part fell by 458 votes to none. The only abstentions came from two GDR deputies elected overseas, Mereana Reid Arbelot and Emmanuel Tjibaou.

The unanimity hides opposite complaints. For La France insoumise's Eric Coquerel, who chairs the finance committee, "ce budget était mauvais à l'origine, il le reste", bad at the start and still bad. For Philippe Juvin of the Droite républicaine, the rapporteur général, it offered "ni les garanties budgétaires, ni les perspectives", neither budgetary guarantees nor prospects. Turnout says as much as the tally: 114 deputies did not vote, including 41 of the 68 Socialists.

2. What the vote erased, and what it brought back

Because the Senate starts again from the government's draft, the rejection works as an eraser. The 0.5% share tax that La France insoumise pushed through on 2 November, which Le Détroit analysed this week, is gone, and the rate stays at 0.4%. So are a tax on some conversions of crypto into stablecoins, a duty to declare self-custody crypto wallets holding €100,000 or more, and a five-year extension of the Girardin tax break for overseas investment. The eraser works both ways: measures deputies had removed come back, such as the government's cut to the tax allowance on pensions.

The government argues that the deputies' version could not have stood. David Amiel, the minister for public action and public accounts, said that had the revenue part been adopted as amended, the state's deficit would have reached €177.1bn, €20.7bn worse than in the government's draft. The left disputed his figures.

3. A race against 17 December

The calendar is now tight. Senators open their debate on 20 November and are due to vote on 9 December; a joint committee of seven deputies and seven senators then looks for a compromise, and if it fails, the Assemblée gets the last word. The Constitution gives Parliament 70 days, which run out at midnight on 17 December. After that the government may enact its own bill by ordinance, a route never used for a budget. Its other tools are article 49.3, which lets it pass the text without a vote at the risk of a censure motion, and a stopgap special law that keeps taxes flowing but allows no new spending, which Sébastien Lecornu said in July he did not intend to use.

France has been here before. The Assemblée rejected the revenue part on 12 November 2024 and again on 22 November 2025; both times the country entered January under a special law and adopted its budget only in February, after a 49.3. This year's rejection came earlier and was total.

4. Le Détroit's reading

The vote is less a verdict on the budget than a sign that no group wanted to own it. For the government, rejection is a tidier outcome than the tally suggests: its draft reaches the Senate, where the right and centre hold the majority, without the deputies' additions and with its own measures restored. The cost is time. The Assemblée keeps the last word if the two chambers cannot agree, and no camp has a majority there, so the endgame looks like the last two years: a 49.3 and a censure motion to survive, or a special law that carries France into 2027 without a budget, which Lecornu has so far ruled out.

For the share tax, the vote settles nothing for good. It now needs senators to revive it, or a government using 49.3 to keep it, and the government opposed it.