Budget: the General Inspectorate of Finance is alarmed by the “major risks” of an extended special law

The General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) is “almost more alarmist” about the consequences of resorting to a special law extended for the budget than in the summer, when it published a report reporting “major risks” in this scenario, one of the co-authors of this report, Jérôme Fournel, told AFP on Tuesday.

“The financial stress, which has increased during the recent period”, with the surge in interest rates at which France borrows on the markets, encourages us to be “almost more alarmist on the hypothesis of a special law (...) than we could have been”, declared to AFP Jérôme Fournel, general inspector of finances and former chief of staff of former Prime Minister Michel Barnier, who had supervised the IGF mission on this subject.

“A special law is not a finance law, it is a stopgap, it works for two months”, but “it is completely different if we have to spend a whole year or almost under this regime in a situation of financial stress. There, for now, it won’t hold,” he continued. “No one wants an absence of a dashboard and management tools if the ill winds of a financial crisis ever blow,” he said.

The mission report commissioned in May from the IGF by the government was published in August. The IGF estimates in this report that a special law applied for months in 2027 “would expose the country to certain difficulties and, in certain respects, to major risks”, and would make the recovery of public finances “impossible”.

Legislative tool used by the government in 2025 and 2026, the special law makes it possible to compensate for the absence of a budget for the coming year if parliament does not vote for it before the end of December, by rolling over revenues from the current year and incurring only the expenses necessary for the continuity of the State. But between the presidential election in spring 2027 and the probable legislative elections afterwards, this time it would risk applying for almost a year, instead of six weeks in previous times.

Since the publication of this report, the situation has deteriorated due to the war in the Middle East and rising interest rates. Which “tends to further harden the message that we were trying to convey in the report,” explained Jérôme Fournel.