⏱️Debating the future of France

Senators start pushing toward a Federal French Republic, while the Assemblèe moves forward towards a budget by voting through the revenue segment of the PLFSS

Follow us

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Twitch | Youtube

👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

This week

• 🏛️French Federal Republic re-enters discussions

• 🗳️Assemblèe adopts revenue segment of budget

Quick Apology

Hey guys, just wanted to make a quick apology for last week as I had set the post to send ahead of my running a half-marathon last Sunday, and then realised that evening that not only it hadn’t sent, but the post wasn’t even there anymore, so all of that went up in smokes, and I’ll try to avoid another similar problem in future.

🏛️French Federal Republic re-enters discussions

The French Senate (photo by Jacques Paquier)

To kick this week off, a French Federal Republic idea emerged, with a senatorial debate on decentralisation seeing former Minister Annick Girardin (Parti Radical) propose it as a potential future for France, and put forward the question:

“What if the France of tomorrow was inspired by the federalist model?”

Putting aside the fact that she claimed that living on Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon “immersed” her “in a [North American] federal environment, despite being 851 km from the United States and about 50 km from Canada, she was supported by other centrist politicians such as former minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (Renaissance).

Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, aka a key federalist Erasmus location (image by TUBS)

With Lemoyne stating the "current “system is at the end of its rope,” he called back to Socialist intellectual Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s work on the federal principle and the “territorial revolution”, and added to the support for the ongoing “great act of decentralisation” that Prime Minister Sèbastien Lecornu promised (if his government survives).

And while there isn’t a wholesale level of support in the French political world, not even in the Senate, we as a country are finding the discussion becoming more and more prominent, and there is one primary question that keeps being raised, as per our Prime Minister:

How do we, as a country, decentralise responsibilities, including budgets, fiscal resources, and freedoms to local authorities? and would this be a good thing?

While I’d like to dig deeper into the topic of a federalist France, and whether this would be a positive thing for France, what form it could take, and whether it could be beneficial or harmful to Europe (potentially over on twitch.tv/julienhoez), it’s currently looking like an uphill fight for all federalists.

More often than not, the topic of federalism in France is discussed as something being imposed on the country due to the ongoing political crisis. The right-wing mayor, Franck Louvrier (LR), claimed that France was “forced into a territorial reorganisation. Otherwise, we are going straight into the wall.”

Similarly, David Lisnard (LR) added to the critiques of the state of the country: “The more centralised the country, the more it is blocked. Centralism has become the problem.”

Naturally, we must always ask ourselves whether they would say the same if they were in the Presidential hot seat, and whether they even want a major transformation of the system, and if it would even eliminate presidentialism in the French Republic.

Loïg Chesnais-Girard (Divers Gauche), who is a Breton supporter of “French-style federalism” and has called for increased “autonomy for voluntary regions,” has himself been clear that any move toward federalism would not be the great night of federalism,” and would instead be an incremental move to give French territories some more breathing room.

If you’d like to read or hear more about this, let me know below and I’ll write up some articles or run a Twitch research stream to go about this.

🗳️Assemblèe adopts revenue segment of budget

The Palais Bourbon (Photo by DXR)

Back to the more pressing topics of French politics today: the Assemblèe Nationale has adopted the first part of the 2026 PLFSS (Projet de Loi de Financement de la Sécurité Sociale), focused on state revenue, passing by a slim margin of 176 votes to 161 (with 58 abstentions).

There were several changes made throughout the debates and voting, such as:

• The freezing of the Contribution Sociale Généralisée (CSG) being rejected overwhelmingly due to the reductions of unemployment, NT benefits and pensions

• The adoption of employer contributions on overtime

• The increase in employer social security contributions from 30% to 40% in the event of contractual terminations or retirement, effectively making it more costly for bosses who were terminating contracts as a fiscal optimisation exercise

• The rejection of an attempt to remove the employee contribution exemption to which apprentices are subjected.

• The rejection of an 8% tax on meal and holiday vouchers

• The adoption of an increase in the Contribution Sociale Généralisée on capital income from 9.2% to 10.6%

• Implementing a minimum contribution requirement for non-European foreigners to cover their health costs.

And that was the (relatively) easy part.

Despite the fact that each addition or removal to the budget proposal was voted on by a majority, and sometimes were even supported on occasion by the far-right RN or the far-left LFI, both of these parties moved against the adoption of the revenue portion of the PLFSS, on top of the general disunity we’ve seen amongst the groups in general.

With time quickly slipping between the fingers of French deputies, the debates will now continue until this coming Wednesday with the expenditure side of the PLFSS (Projet de Loi de Financement de la Sécurité Sociale).

Which, as many of you may know, will include the suspension of the pension reform promised by Sèbastien Lecornu, and is arguably the only reason why the Budget is currently being processed through the legislative process.

And as you can imagine, this is why many on the far left and far right do not want it to succeed.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below: