when it comes to renewed attempts to get lawmakers on the far left and far right to agree to a 2025 budget. In the meantime, deputies in the National Assembly are expected to agree to roll over the 2024 budget into 2025 in order to prevent a shutdown on Jan. 1. Nonetheless, there’s no clarity on an eventual agreement on next year’s budget will be reached, making the new government’s position as fragile as the last. “The path towards securing a 2025 budget is unclear,” Raphael Brun-Aguerre, an economist at JPMorgan, said in a note Friday. “Bringing onboard demands from opposition parties may be fiscally costly and the degree of fiscal consolidation may be limited next year as a result,” he said in emailed comments. There is speculation that Bayrou will look to parties within the left-wing New Popular Front alliance to prevent another no-confidence motion from being tabled, and to pave the way for an agreement on the 2025 budget. “If Bayrou can ‘buy off’ the 66 Socialist deputies (far from certain), he would have split the left wing alliance of New Popular Front which voted with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party to bring down Barnier last week,” Mujtaba Rahman, managing director of Europe at Eurasia Group, said in an emailed note. “With the support of 20 or so independents he could hope to avoid a censure motion or even pass a budget in the normal way once revised tax and spending plans for 2025 are presented in the new year. Any threat of another censure vote in the Assembly by the combined forces of far right and hard left would have been neutralised or much reduced,” Rahman said. Eurasia Group said its base case scenario is that Bayrou has a narrow window of opportunity — a 60% probability — to enact a 2025 budget in the first few months of 2025. This would be based on the Barnier budget but amended to appeal to the moderate left, the consultancy