France slashes €1B more from aid budget

France intends to make a further €1 billion (about $1.1 billion) cut to its aid budget in 2025, according to an initial 2025 national budget prepared this summer — having already slashed foreign aid spending last year and earlier this year. The draft budget, published in September 2024, seeks to rein in spending to tackle a soaring public deficit. But it does this in a way that has the development community deeply upset. The two areas receiving the biggest funding reductions are development aid and domestic spending to combat climate change while spending increases for the military, 6%, and other security areas, 7%. In total, the draft budget contains around a €1 billion cut to a €6 billion budget item labeled as the “ODA mission,” which funds an important part of France’s contributions to multilateral organizations, bilateral aid, humanitarian aid, and debt forgiveness, and is delivered through the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Economics and Finance. Total French ODA in 2023 was $15.4 billion according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. This includes the activities of the French development agency, or AFD; France’s contribution to the EU’s ODA budget; and the costs of hosting refugees in France. It is not clear if or how the rest of the budget might be affected. The cut “was totally unexpected,” Olivier Bruyeron, president of Coordination SUD, an association representing 180 French NGOs, told Devex. “It will be the most vulnerable countries and sectors that will be affected,” he said. “We have multiyear programs which will have to be modified or canceled. Civil society organizations are feeling a great deal of anxiety and disappointment.” The proposed cut is the third major reduction in foreign aid in less than two years. Spending in 2023 went down substantially. According to OECD calculations, total ODA fell by 11% in 2023, moving France down from fourth to fifth place among donor countries, below the United Kingdom. Then, this past February, the government announced cuts to the budget already adopted for the year, including around $806 million from the narrower ODA mission. Instead of reversing that cut, the draft 2025 budget deepens it. The 2025 budget was prepared in the summer, before a recent snap election that saw a change of government. A new center-right prime minister, Michel Barnier, officially took over on Sept. 21, although his government is already under threat from the New Popular Front, a left-wing alliance that won the largest number of seats in the recent election but was controversially not invited to form a government by French President Emmanuel Macron. In theory, the new government could modify the draft budget. However, French NGOs are not optimistic. “There is very little time since the government must submit the new budget to the National Assembly in the beginning of October,” said Alan Anic, international solidarity campaigns and advocacy officer at Oxfam France. Nor is there much hope that Barnier, a conservative whose new government is seen as more right-wing than the one it replaces, would be inclined to withdraw the cuts. Still, “it’s not yet irreversible,” says Coordination SUD’s Bruyeron. “We hope the members of parliament will change the budget.” Anic told Devex that the election result shows there is popular support for “fiscal justice.” “We say, tax the most polluting and richest companies,” he said. In a press release, Oxfam France commented “[T]he government has once again decided to make savings on the backs of the poorest people on this planet.” And Oxfam is not alone. There appears to be widespread support within the development community for raising revenues by increasing the rates and application of the financial transaction taxes, which they point out are higher in some other European countries, including the U.K. The progressive shrinking of the foreign aid budget over the last two years goes against the strongly pro-aid position taken by Macron since he was elected in 2017 and up to at least the middle of last year. Under Macron, France’s total aid budget grew from $11.6 billion in 2017 to a high point of $17.6 billion in 2022. Moreover, in 2021, the French Parliament adopted an “international solidarity” law promoted by Macron, calling for France to meet the United Nations target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid by 2025. By 2022, France’s foreign aid peaked at 0.56% of its gross national income, though it fell back to 0.5% the following year when spending was reduced. “This raises the question: What does the commitment of a French President and a law passed by Parliament mean?” protests Coordination SUD’s Bruyeron. Macron has continued to push development issues. In June last year, he hosted a Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, attended by representatives from 100 countries, including 40 heads of state and government, aimed at increasing global financing for development and combating climate change. Yet only weeks later, in a hint of the further cuts to come, the target for reaching the 0.7% goal was quietly pushed back to 2030. Now even that deadline seems in doubt. Fatou Elise Ba, humanitarian and development research fellow at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, says the situation is in part linked to developments in the former French colonies of francophone Africa, traditionally the largest recipients of French assistance. In the last two years, France has been forced to draw down troops it had based in the region. This has been the case, especially in the Sahel region, where over 5,000 French troops were sent to fight jihadists — with mixed results and falling local support. France was told to withdraw all its troops from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, where military-led juntas took power and made new security agreements with Russia. France’s waning fortunes in the Sahel, combined with fiscal pressures at home, may make it less eager to provide development aid, which in turn could further undermine France’s popularity in the region. “France is not following an isolationist policy, but a policy of reducing [domestic] social spending and international spending,” said Ba. “It’s a right-wing policy of not wanting to tax the rich in France.” She adds: “It’s an incoherent policy. There is an alarming international situation, with climate change and conflicts around the world, yet France is going backwards when it comes to foreign aid, weakening its soft power.”