France Adopts 2026 Budget Despite Two No-Confidence Votes

A Budget Adopted by Force

France finally has its budget. On February 2, 2026, Parliament definitively adopted the finance law for 2026, after the National Assembly rejected two new motions of no confidence filed in response to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu's third invocation of Article 49-3 of the Constitution. A parliamentary marathon lasting more than four months, marked by three government accountability commitments and six motions of no confidence in total, thus ended in a climate of persistent political tension.

The motion filed by La France insoumise, the Greens, and the Communists garnered 260 votes, 29 fewer than the 289 needed to overthrow the government. The motion from the Rassemblement National, allied with the Union of the Right for the Republic, obtained only 135 votes. The Lecornu government's survival owes much to the calculated abstention of the Socialists, who traded their neutrality for several significant budgetary concessions.

Compromises That Widen the Deficit

To secure the Socialist Party's abstention, Sébastien Lecornu agreed to costly adjustments: indexing the income tax scale to inflation, maintaining the surtax on the profits of large companies, increasing the activity bonus by approximately 50 euros per month for low-wage workers, meals at 1 euro for all students, and unfreezing social benefits.

These concessions weighed heavily on the budgetary equation. The public deficit, initially targeted at 4.7% of GDP, is now expected to reach 5% of GDP in 2026—still down from 5.4% in 2025, but far from the ambition stated at the beginning of the term. The OFCE (French Economic Observatory) speaks of a "compromise deficit," emphasizing that the budgetary consolidation effort has been halved.

Debt Spirals Out of Control

French public debt is expected to exceed 118% of GDP in 2026, compared to 115.9% in 2025. The state's interest charges are mechanically rising with the increase in rates: they have more than doubled since 2020, threatening to devour a growing share of tax revenues at the expense of useful expenditures—education, health, investments.

The Court of Auditors has warned that the deficit reduction target remains "far from guaranteed," pointing to the fragility of the macroeconomic assumptions used by the government. Economic growth is indeed expected to be only 1% in 2026, hampered by the political instability that has persisted since the dissolution of the National Assembly in June 2024. According to some estimates, this sequence of turbulence has cost up to 0.8 percentage points of GDP in growth between 2024 and 2026, or approximately 24 billion euros.

Defense Preserved, Between Ambition and Constraints

In this context of austerity, the defense budget is an exception: the credits for the Defense mission are increasing by 6.5 billion euros, bringing the total envelope to 57.1 billion euros excluding pensions. Paris intends to accelerate the build-up of its military capabilities in response to pressure from NATO and the deterioration of the international geopolitical context.

But experts and parliamentarians are questioning the sustainability of this defense effort in the long term, as budgetary room for maneuver shrinks and France struggles to convince its European partners of the solidity of its commitments. The question of Paris's financial credibility—both to the markets and to its allies—remains open.

Still Fragile Political Stability

While the budget has been passed, the political situation remains precarious. The Lecornu government has been governing without an absolute majority since the dissolution, forced to negotiate each text on a case-by-case basis. "France finally has a budget," the Prime Minister declared on the evening of the vote, hailing "the result of a parliamentary compromise." A formula that sums up the state of a democracy under tension, where the adoption of the most fundamental financial text of the year comes down to a few votes.