Lecornu on the brink
Bardella's €240,000 in campaign expenses were rejected as Faure gave Lecornu an ultimatum before bringing down his government.
👋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
🧑⚖️Bardella’s rejected campaign expenditure
🌹Parti Socialiste lose patience, threaten Lecornu
⏲️Short dispatch this week
Normally, I’d take one of these final weekends in October off for Birthday shenanigans, but rather than take a full weekend off, I still wanted to give you guys some updates from the weekend.
🧑⚖️Bardella’s rejected campaign expenditure
So, to start off, the Paris administrative court appears to have sparked a new scandal for the Rassemblement National, having rejected the campaign accounts of RN leader Jordan Bardella during the last European Elections in 2024.
The court rejected and deemed abusive over €240,000 in expenses, including luxury hotels, champagne, private chauffeurs, large meals, and exorbitant gifts, which will hamper his attempts to portray himself as a man of the people.
In terms of the raw numbers, Bardella’s RN demanded €3,941 for a private driver, €66,544 for his personal safety, and even €13,045 for meals for him and his team, which are normally considered matters and expenses for political parties, not the French political system.
For those of you looking at the European level, one of these gifts was an €88 bottle of champagne offered to the leader of the Spanish far-right outfit, Vox.
Not bad for a man known for calling for France to “cut corners on bad public spending.”
🌹Parti Socialiste lose patience, threaten Lecornu
Talking about public spending, the debates in the Assemblée Nationale have been raging for two days, with debates taking place and dragging on due to the sheer number of amendments to discuss.
One of the two major demands made by the centre-left was the Zucman tax and a more equitable taxation system that wouldn’t burden the average French citizen or families.
Now, this has been complicated by several things:
Firstly, the Zucman tax debate was delayed by several days due to the sheer volume of amendments and debates.
On the topic of the Zucman tax, the government has said it considers it “out of the question” to tax professional assets of companies under the Zucman tax, which would remove a decent chunk of the potential tax base and likely introduce a loophole for business owners to use.
Faure’s PS has therefore introduced an amended version that exempts family businesses and “innovative” businesses, which they claim addresses the government’s concerns.
Secondly, calls for tax justice appear to be falling on deaf ears everywhere, with the government suffering major defeats during the budget debates.
Laurent Wauquiez (Les Républicains) submitted an amendment proposing tax exemptions on all overtime, which has been noted as mostly benefiting senior executives and costing the economy around €1 billion.
Not only this, but Wauquiez also proposed an amendment to index the income tax scale to inflation, which blocks a government proposal to implement a scale that would have added 200,000 additional households to income tax brackets and increased the brackets of a few thousand more.
Meaning that the state economy takes another €2 billion hit.
Third, the President of the French Senate, Gérard Larcher (Les Répulicains), has said that if the Assemblée votes to suspend the Pension reform, which was part of the deal between the PS and the government, the Senate will reinstate it as a matter of fact.
Which, altogether, means that the government cannot actually fulfil its end of the bargain, and in effect, basically kills the deal between the Government and the Parti Socialiste that allowed Sébastien Lecornu’s government.
This is why Faure, pictured above, went on BFM TV and confirmed what his colleague had said: “If there is no significant development by Monday … it’s over.”
As he explained to journalists, it’s because his party finds it intolerable that the less wealthy, the most modest, the poorest in society, and those who need help find themselves having to pay more in their daily lives because the richest in French society don’t.
It’s been heartening to see our politicians being able to actually get down to work on the things they need to do, such as creating a budget, but it’s also not surprising that things are going in this direction.
But we also have to ask ourselves why anyone, let alone Faure, thought they’d get everything they wanted in this political debate?
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:
bardella news has me dancing a jig. fantastic!
A fine short review!