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The French Assembly has voted in favor of a social security budget that would suspend the country’s pension reforms, a major victory for embattled Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
The government won a narrow majority for the bill after the centre-left Socialist Party voted in support of the bill, with 247 MPs voting in favour, 234 against and 93 abstaining.
Lecornu praised the result, which allowed him to continue negotiations to give France a state budget until the end of the year, saying at the X: “This responsible majority shows that the agreement is not just a slogan: it allows us to make progress in the common interest.”
The vote comes after the government made several concessions to the Left on the welfare and pension packages.
As well as suspending President Emmanuel Macron’s reforms to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, the government abandoned plans to increase medical costs borne by patients and freeze pensions and social benefits that would rise in line with inflation.
Prominent Socialist deputy Boris Vallaud told journalists after the vote that his party’s “bet” to support the text was successful, and he kept the possibility of future deals open, saying: “We are open to discussion and we will get there every time.”
The far-right Resemble National and far-left France Unbiased parties voted against the bill, while the center-right Horizons party largely abstained on the text after its leader and Macron’s former prime minister, Edouard Philippe, broke with other parties in the government’s weak centrist coalition.
Most of the 38 Green representatives and their allies said they were also absent Tuesday after a last-minute amendment to increase medical insurance spending by 2 to 3 percent in 2026 passed.
The deal means the social security budget deficit will be less than €20bn, Lecornu said, higher than the initial target of €17.6bn but an improvement on this year’s figure of €23bn.
He said that without the agreement, the deficit would have exceeded €30bn.
The crucial vote means the Social Security package will now go to the right-wing dominated Senate, which can push against it but is unable to stop the bill from being enacted.
Failure to pass the welfare package would have increased pressure on Lecornu to resign and jeopardized negotiations on state budget legislation. It must also be approved in the coming weeks to avoid costly rollovers of 2025 spending plans into 2026.
Lecornu was appointed in September following the fall of François Bayrou, but stepped down just hours after forming his first government in early October due to disagreements within his government coalition over some appointments. A few days later, Macron re-appointed him and entrusted him with the task of delivering the budget.
Facing a divided National Assembly, he has opted to abandon a constitutional instrument that enables the government to force through legislation and has instead opted to negotiate texts with the French Parliament. This led to long and often heated debates.
While the vote is an initial validation of this method, Lecornu now faces the tough challenge of finding a similar compromise on the state budget, which was largely rejected by lawmakers in the first reading last month.
Lecornu said, “It will be difficult, perhaps even more than in recent weeks. But the government’s mentality will not change: the common interest will come first, without giving way to panic or the electoral agenda.”
