The left-wing coalition Nupes presented a bill to the Assembly on Wednesday to tax the "superprofits" of big companies and try to obtain a referendum of shared initiative, a long-term procedure which must first be validated by the constitutionnal Council.

The text was signed by 240 parliamentarians, said the first secretary of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure.

The text of the Nupes (LFI, PS, PCF and EELV) must obtain the green light from the Constitutional Council within a month, and nearly five million citizen signatures to trigger a referendum.



“We hope that this procedure will create a balance of power” with the presidential majority, underlined Olivier Faure, while the debate on the taxation of “superprofits”, in a period of explosion in energy prices and high cost of living , will punctuate the budgetary discussions all autumn in Parliament.

Before a hypothetical referendum in several months, the rebellious deputy Eric Coquerel, at the head of the Finance Committee, hopes to "win this battle" in the fall, by amendments to the draft budget 2023.

TotalEnergies in the viewfinder

The text of the Nupes plans to tax the “superprofits” of “large companies”, “mostly multinationals”, with a turnover greater than 750 million euros, all sectors combined.

And the left points to targets: the oil group TotalEnergies, the pharmaceutical group Sanofi and the shipowner CMA CGM, in sectors where "exceptional profits have been made, decorrelated from any innovation, productivity gain or internal strategic decision at the company ".

The "contribution", which would apply until December 31, 2025, would affect companies whose additional taxable income is at least 1.25 times higher than the average result for the years 2017, 2018, 2019, with a progressive tax scale of 20%, 25% or 33% of the “superprofits”.

Neither totem nor taboo

On the side of the presidential majority, a tax is “neither a totem nor a taboo”, believes MP David Amiel, but the macronists favor a “European solution to avoid distortion of competition” between countries.

The European Commission is proposing a “contribution” to producers and distributors of gas, coal and oil and would like to cap the income of producers of electricity from nuclear and renewables, which reap exceptional profits.

The shared initiative referendum procedure (RIP) has never succeeded since its introduction in the Constitution in 2008. A previous RIP proposal, against the ultimately aborted privatization of Aéroports de Paris, had collected 1.1 million supporters , far from the necessary threshold.

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  • Nudes

  • Olivier Faure

  • Tax

  • Referendum

  • Economy