It was an enchanting interlude, full of gold and silver, when France forgot its anger and sorrowful spirit for a time, seeming "to have taken a vacation from itself," as the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais summed up in early August. We almost forgot that that country existed. After the enthusiasm of the Olympic Games, which continues, in a minor form, with the Paralympic events, the harsh reality of France's budget has taken hold, just a few weeks before Parliament examines the 2025 budget bill. This major political-economic deadline promises to be a perilous one: Never before in the Fifth Republic has there been so much uncertainty over the content and passage of the mother of all bills.

The prime minister and Finance Ministry will not be starting from scratch. Over the summer, the caretaker government carried out an unprecedented exercise: Preparing a budget bill that was described as "reversible," rolling over €492 billion from 2024, which represents a €10 billion cut when taking inflation into account. The outgoing prime minister, Gabriel Attal, nevertheless allowed himself to make cuts in employment and environmental credits, while the public accounts ministry has just reported a slight drop in expected tax revenues.

A double constraint – political and financial – weighs on the budget's preparation. This is unprecedented. Until now, the bill allowed a government with a majority in the Assemblée Nationale (even if relative) to put forward its priorities, without any major risk of seeing its bill rejected. Today, the opposite is true, and decisions will be dictated by politics rather than policy: The goal is to present a text likely to be adopted without the government being toppled. "It is around the budget that a coalition or legislative pact will or will not be built," said Thomas Cazenave, outgoing minister for public accounts, in an interview in the newspaper Les Echos on August 5.

The budget bill therefore plays an unprecedented role. More than just a one-off project, it will define the context within which a coalition could manage the country, for want of reforming it. This carries the obvious risk of producing a budget that reflects the lowest common denominator between the parties that accepted this "legislative pact," which could be close to disintegrating at any moment. What's more, it could leave the country bogged down until the next dissolution of the Assemblé – at the earliest, next year– and, more certainly, until the 2027 presidential election.

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