The political crisis in Charente will have particularly rare consequences for a community of this size. Having failed to vote its 2025 budget on Tuesday, the departmental council will indeed be put under prefectural supervision this Wednesday.
At the end of March, this budget, in the amount of 615 million euros, had been found during a first vote, due in particular to the abstention of a group of six elected representatives of the left majority which had split after months of political dissension within the assembly of this territory of some 350,000 inhabitants.
Bouty denounces a “coup attempt”
The executive chaired by Philippe Bouty (DVG) therefore had until Tuesday to present a new copy and have it voted, under penalty of seeing the prefect take control of departmental finances by entering the Regional Chamber of Accounts (CRC). But at 8 p.m., the quorum had not been reached for the Assembly to be held, the elected officials of the opposition and the secessionist group having not come to sit.
“We do not have the quorum and we return the keys to the CRC. It is an unparalleled precedent. Tonight, the Charente will be the only department not to have a budget, “said the president of the department, who employs some 2,000 agents, in front of the press. He deplored an “attempted putsch” on the part of the right -wing elected officials and the senator PS Nicole Bonnefoy, one of the six elected officials on the left to have boycotted the session after having abstained at the end of March.
Philippe Bouty, who had turned the department on the left in 2021 with a single canton in advance, quickly saw his plural left majority crack, his criticisms accusing him of “untimely ads” and “sometimes inadequate behaviors”. “It is not a problem of anyone but of dysfunctions for years, which have become unacceptable in the long run,” said Nicole Bonnefoy, accused by elected officials who have remained in the majority of coveting the head of the executive.
CRC will take matters into hand
The group of secessionists and the opposition, led by the centrist Jérôme Sourisseau, who chaired the departmental council in 2020-2021, claim the resignation of Philippe Bouty since his minority at the end of March, but the latter refused to do so.
Our New Aquitaine file
The regional financial control body, the CRC of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, will now have a month to develop a new draft budget and transmit it to the prefect. This will then have twenty days to have it executed as it is, with the possibility of making motivated changes.
