M. Pinay Wins Through
M. Pinay has succeeded in doing what the two previous Premiers in the present French Assembly had failed to do. He has secured the passage of the Finance Bill. It does not sound like a particularly spectacular achievement. It might be re- garded as the minimum duty of any National Assembly to inform the country what taxes it must pay and what the national expenditure will be. And indeed it would be unwise to give M. Pinay any undue credit for getting the Budget passed with the aid of an amnesty for tax-evaders and the time-honoured French device of trying to raise in loans what the citizens will not provide in taxes. There was, indeed, an air of levity about the final stage of the debate, in which the Finance Bill was passed by 311 votes to 206, which indicated plainly enough that there has been no fundamental change of heart in the French Assembly. But there have been several adjustments in the Attitudes of the parties which should not be ignored. M. Pinay in the end owed his survival to the reluctance of the Gaullists to bring the Government down, as they could have done by voting against it on any of the ten votes of confidence which were put on Tuesday night. This re- moves the Gaullists from their recent role of reluctant breakers to that of reluctant makers of Governments. In other words it takes them one step further into the morass of French party politics, which General de Gaulle so cordially hates. At the same time the Socialists showed a slightly less destructive temper than they have been accustomed to show in the past few yea,rs. All this adds up to very little. M. Pinay's Govern- ment still has no guarantee of a long life. But now that the Finance Bill is out of the way it is at least removed from its worst fear of sudden death.
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