They left as quickly as they had arrived, with a touch of anger thrown in. On Tuesday, September 17, the chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, Eric Coquerel (LFI), and the general rapporteur of the Committee, Charles de Courson (Liot), went to Matignon to demand the ceiling letters. These documents set the credits of the ministries within the framework of the 2025 budget project. But about 30 minutes after their arrival, the deputies left… empty-handed.
Neither consultation nor obtaining
The deputies had decided to take matters into their own hands and had arrived on rue de Varenne on foot, from the Assembly, around 12:30. To greet them, an absent Prime Minister. The only ones present: the chief of staff Baptiste Rolland and the secretary general of the government Claire Landais, who both refused to consult the ceiling letters, failing to obtain them.
“We are quite stunned […] because we were refused access to these documents,” declared Eric Coquerel as he left Matignon. “It is a constitutional right that is granted to the chairman of the Finance Committee and the general budget rapporteur, we were refused it,” he added, ending by accusing President Emmanuel Macron of “endangering democracy.” While the documents were indeed communicated to the ministries in August by the resigning government, the parliamentarians, for their part, are waiting in vain.
Prime Minister Michel Barnier explained to the chairman of the committee on Monday evening that the budget would be “built on the basis of these ceiling letters”, adopted by the outgoing government and communicated to the ministries on 20 August. The head of government had also promised him in the same letter to communicate to him by the end of the week a “provisional version” of the “offprint”, a report summarising the amount of credits by mission and the general orientations of the budget.
“My duty is not to wait”
But for Eric Coquerel, who has been waiting since July 15, the deadline for transmission, there is no question of waiting another day. “I consider that it is not my duty to wait another week to obtain a document on the working basis of the budget sent to the ministries for almost a month! So I will go […] to Matignon to obtain them,” he declared at the start of the day, judging that these ceiling letters “are necessary to accomplish (their) work as parliamentarians.”
During these precious days, the clock is ticking to submit the draft finance bill (PLF) to Parliament. “We are two months late [sur le calendrier prévu par la loi organique, NDLR]. We are expected to be delayed by eight days in submitting the budget, which I do not agree with,” Eric Coquerel recently stated. Indeed, Michel Barnier, who will make his general policy statement “at the beginning of October”, plans to present the voluminous PLF to Parliament on October 9, instead of the 1st as recommended by the organic law. Parliament must then have 70 days to decide, the Constitutional Council five days to study possible appeals. All this, before publication by December 31. The chairman of the Finance Committee therefore does not intend to stop there, and announced that he would go to Bercy on Wednesday to try, for the umpteenth time, to obtain the much-desired documents.