The die is cast. The 2025 Finance Bill has been passed and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Not even the rebel MPs. Finance Minister Sihem Nemsia had presented a 68-article finance bill to implement a budget that had already been voted on and sealed.
In committee, the rebels drowned her out with 104 proposed articles, many of which had obvious financial implications and others in the form of budget riders for which the minister and her team were unprepared in terms of resource availability.
This was particularly the case as the 82 articles that remained of the 104 proposals after lengthy discussions in committee had made it possible to set aside the proposed articles with a high financial impact from the Finance Bill presented by Minister Nemsia.
Rebellious to the end, the MPs had reaffirmed the principle that “the ARP is sovereign” and presented all their demands to the plenary session.
The Minister’s boots on the ground, despite the real needs of pensioners
Undeterred by all the pressure for a more social finance law and all the explanations about the purchasing power of certain sections of the population, Sihem Nemsia, finance minister in the government of Kais Saïed, rejected almost all the deputies’ proposals.
Her only argument is fiscal, even with regard to pensioners, who are a force to be reckoned with, albeit with pensions that are sometimes ridiculous in terms of the cost of living and, in any case, heavily taxed in a pay-as-you-go pension system after salaries that are already heavily taxed.
Pensioners are also an important political force in elections. Pensioners, too, who have always demanded an increase in their pensions, despite the silence of every government.
Pensioners pay almost a billion dinars a year to the taxman
For the minister, who has defended her draft finance law tooth and nail, the only things that count are the financial balances she has established, and there is no question of that changing, especially when it comes to spending.
The impact of Article is TND 902 million, while I have long and repeatedly spoken of the search for balance. The balances for 2025 have already been established on the basis of the impact of the fiscal measures already included in the 2025 Finance Act, in addition to the medium-term balances, 2025-2027, which take into account the gradual elimination of the primary budget deficit that we forecast for 2027,’ she first told the MPs.
However, the article in favor of reducing the tax burden on retirement pensions, as presented by the MPs, referred to the start of implementation … in 2026 and to a gradual reduction in the tax. In theory, therefore, the minister had time to find the TND 900 million and could otherwise negotiate a smaller reduction in the tax on old-age pensions in order to protect both sides of the argument.
Undaunted, the minister even found the ‘courage’ to point out that ‘pensioners already benefit from a preferential system for taxing old-age pensions, including 25% on the tax base instead of 10% for everyone else, in addition to the 5% exemption’.
She went on to claim that ‘in the new tax system, which will cost the state TND 650 million, pensioners will be the category that will benefit the most in terms of increased salaries and pensions which reach up to TND 4,000 per month’.
Slingers are out of the way and pensioners are the ‘fall guys”
The minister must have forgotten that the same tax scale is based on income levels, and that sometimes a single dinar more can change the income level of a pensioner so that he or she is taxed more heavily!
A sore loser (her defenders will say that she showed a sense of responsibility and that she was acting in her role as a minister) and after an initial vote in favor of the pensioners by the Front deputies, the Finance Minister concluded that “with all these preferential aspects, there will be an impact on the financial balances, which is contrary to article 49 of the Budget Law and article 69 of the Constitution”.
She then came back late on Monday, December 2 to present a new article of the Finance Bill, which removed any financial impact on her bill from the deputies’ proposal. The slingers then gave in and it was the pensioners who ended up paying the price and being the fools in this semblance of a parliamentary farce!
