PARIS, Feb 8 (Reuters) – Less than a week after surviving a five-month-long battle over France’s 2026 budget, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu set out his agenda over the weekend, \u200bprioritising energy and defence.<\/p>\n
Budget wrangling consumed French politics for nearly two years and cost \u200ctwo prime ministers before Lecornu was appointed in September.<\/p>\n
“France has a budget that aims to reduce the deficit to 5% without \u200craising taxes. Few believed it would happen in the autumn,” Lecornu said.<\/p>\n
Despite rising popularity and polls showing neither President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists nor conservatives could defeat the far-right National Rally in the 2027 presidential election, Lecornu repeated he had no interest in running.<\/p>\n
He added that a minor cabinet reshuffle would take \u2060place ahead of March local elections.<\/p>\n
Here \u200care Lecornu’s priorities for the coming months.<\/p>\n
ENERGY<\/p>\n
The prime minister said the government’s next “multi\u2011year energy programme” would be signed by decree by the end of next week, \u200dafter more than two years of delays.<\/p>\n
He confirmed that state-owned EDF will build six new nuclear reactors, with an option for eight others, while investment in renewable energy – including offshore wind, solar and geothermal power \u2014 would remain “ambitious”.<\/p>\n
“Next, \u200bwe will need to consider incentives to speed up electrification. The goal is to ensure \u200cthat 60% of our consumption in 2030 is electric.”<\/p>\n
DEFENCE<\/p>\n
“Increasing the defence budget (57 billion euros or $67.35 billion), which will double between 2017 and 2027, is essential … we must continue,” Lecornu said.<\/p>\n
He also said the military programming law would be updated by Bastille Day on July 14.<\/p>\n
DECENTRALISATION<\/p>\n
“The new international landscape and the state of our public finances make it urgent to refocus the state on certain tasks. It \u2060must therefore rely more clearly on other local public actors \u200bto exercise certain powers,” Lecornu said.<\/p>\n
He added that a bill \u200bcontaining 50 “simplification” measures would be submitted to parliament before the March local elections.<\/p>\n
STATE MEDICAL AID<\/p>\n
Lecornu pledged to maintain State Medical Aid (AME), a French social assistance scheme primarily \u200dcovering the medical costs \u2060of undocumented migrants \u2014 which the far right has vowed to scrap if it comes to power in 2027.<\/p>\n
However, he announced two decrees to reform the programme: one aimed at combating \u2060fraud, with savings of 180 million euros, and a second focused on modernising government IT systems to ensure all civil \u200cservants responsible for the scheme have access.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS, Feb 8 (Reuters) – Less than a week after surviving a five-month-long battle over France’s 2026 budget,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":750667,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36,10751,12840,12184,163179,5442,12338],"class_list":{"0":"post-750666","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-local-elections","12":"tag-president-emmanuel-macron","13":"tag-prime-minister","14":"tag-prime-ministers","15":"tag-renewable-energy","16":"tag-sebastien-lecornu"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116035328823841881","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/750667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}