France is to scrap its television licence fee after the Senate approved Emmanuel Macron’s election promise to cut the public broadcasting tax in order to boost households’ spending power.
But during a heated Senate debate that ran into the early hours of Tuesday morning, opponents on the left raised what they called important concerns over the future funding and independence of public television and radio, warning that public broadcasting risked being weakened.
Some on the right were also critical, calling for a proper discussion on a wider overhaul of public broadcasting, saying the quality of debate in the Senate had been “lousy”.
When Macron ran for a second term as president this spring, he argued that scrapping the broadcasting licence fee made sense because he wanted to continue lowering taxes. The far right’s Marine Le Pen, who was beaten by Macron in the final vote, wanted to go further, not just scrapping the licence fee but privatising public television and radio in mainland France.
The French licence fee is €138 (£115) a year in mainland France and applies to about 27m homes who declare a television set. By comparison, the UK TV licence is £159.
The culture minister, Rima Abdul Malak, said the government would in the short term protect public television and radio budgets while drawing up a “roadmap” for the future of public broadcasting. The current bill would, in the short term, allocate a “fraction of VAT” to public broadcasting, at about €3.7bn, which is roughly the amount that the licence fee currently brings in.
But senators from several different parties, from right to left, attacked what they called a lack of concrete strategy on how funding would be secured in the long term. Some said they agreed that the licence fee, based on owning a television set, was outdated and “obsolete” and that “French people won’t miss it”. But they warned the bill was rushed and poorly prepared.
Jean-Raymond Hugonet of the rightwing party Les Républicains said there was a “problem of timing”; the bill amounted to demagoguery and was pushed through too fast without a public broadcasting strategy. He said: “We had a president who wanted to get re-elected and who proposed something very popular: scrapping a worn-down and unjust tax which no one wanted any more.” Hugonet argued that more work needed to be done on future funding mechanisms.
The Socialist senator David Assouline said: “The stakes are high in our society, where there is a large concentration of private channels and foreign platforms, meaning we must strengthen public broadcasting.” He said the culture minister had “hailed the glory” of French public broadcasting yet was “creating the conditions for weakening it”.
