France's Finance Minister Says He'll Use 'Whatever It Takes' to Pass the Budget

French Finance Minister Roland Lescure said he is confident France will pass next year's budget, and made clear that confidence rests less on winning a conventional parliamentary vote than on the government's willingness to use constitutional tools if lawmakers can't agree on a bill.

Lescure framed the government's position in blunt terms. I'm convinced of this because we have no choice, and we have the tools to get it passed, so I'm convinced we'll succeed, he said, describing two specific mechanisms available if the budget process veers off track: Article 49.3, which lets the government push legislation through without a conventional final vote, and decree powers tied to what he called the budgetary highway.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lescure went further, saying the government is prepared to do whatever it takes to get a budget passed, explicitly including invoking Article 49.3 even though doing so exposes the government to a no-confidence motion from parliament. That's a meaningful risk in France's current political environment, where fragile coalition arithmetic has made no-confidence votes a live threat rather than a theoretical one.

The willingness to bypass a standard vote reflects how little room Lescure believes France has to negotiate. He described the two mechanisms, 49.3 and the decree powers, as guardrails: if we veer off course, we'll activate the guardrails, a framing that treats using constitutional force not as a last resort to be avoided but as a standing part of the plan if ordinary negotiation fails.

That stance comes against a backdrop of persistent fiscal strain. Lescure has separately acknowledged that France will struggle to meet its budget-deficit targets and has said recent bond market turmoil has reinforced the need for fiscal discipline, even as he maintains that France remains far from needing direct support from the European Central Bank on its debt.

The combination, acknowledging the deficit goal is hard to hit while simultaneously signaling the government will force a budget through regardless of parliamentary resistance, captures where French fiscal policy stands heading into the vote: short on political consensus, but not short on the legal tools to act without it.