France vows to fight insolvency by canceling holidays, ignoring economics, and pretending the street won’t rise up again.
France has once again decided to stage its national pastime: the performance of economic catastrophe dressed up as political theater. Prime Minister François Bayrou, with the solemnity of a priest intoning the last rites, has announced that the country’s debt is unsustainable and that €44 billion must be immediately slashed from the deficit. One almost admires the Gallic flair for melodrama: the deficit, at 5.8% of GDP, is serious, yes, but hardly apocalyptic. Yet Bayrou insists, like a prophet on the barricades, that unless the cuts are enacted at once, “we will have no future.”
It is a curious performance, half-suicidal honesty, half-calculated desperation. His government is a minority, his popularity abysmal, and his rivals sharpening their knives. By calling a parliamentary session in September to demand an up-or-down vote on austerity, Bayrou is essentially climbing the scaffold and daring the deputies to pull the lever.
The irony here is almost too rich. France, the country that invented the modern welfare state, proposes to rescue itself from fiscal peril by scrapping national holidays—including May 8th, which commemorates the victory over Nazi Germany. This is austerity as farce: asking citizens to give up the day celebrating their liberation in order to pay interest on debt, much of it owed to German banks. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ever the tribune of the Left, smells blood and has declared for “a determined offensive” to topple the government. Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, shouts about the failures of “Macronism,” hoping voters will confuse debt arithmetic with immigration policy.
What Bayrou grasps, and what his opponents will not admit, is that the debt service itself—€66 billion this year, projected to balloon to €107 billion by 2028—is becoming the state’s largest single program, dwarfing education and rivaling defense. France is approaching the economic condition of a pensioner who spends more on interest payments than on food or medicine. The arithmetic is not negotiable.
But here John Kenneth Galbraith’s warning about “conventional wisdom” ought to be recalled. Cutting spending during economic stagnation often exacerbates the stagnation, resulting in even less growth and, consequently, even less revenue. France has danced this minuet before: in the 1980s, François Mitterrand abandoned socialist expansion and turned to austerity, ushering in a generation of economic sclerosis. Today’s debate risks repeating the pattern: governments falling one after another, each promising fiscal realism, each producing political instability instead.
The spectacle also confirms an old truth: that cowardice in politics often masquerades as courage. Bayrou insists his gambit is an act of moral clarity, but in reality, it is the desperate bet of a man with no cards left to play. If he falls, he will be remembered not as the statesman who saved France from bankruptcy but as the hapless premier who thought abolishing Easter Monday would balance the books.
And what of France itself? The likeliest future is neither collapse nor salvation, but muddle: a revolving door of weak governments, each hostage to street protests and the siren calls of populists, while the debt creeps higher. The markets may eventually force Paris to act, but by then the medicine will be harsher, the patient weaker, and the political class utterly discredited.
France, land of Voltaire and de Gaulle, deserves better than this operetta of fiscal doom. But perhaps the truest French tradition is not grandeur but survival — stumbling from one crisis to the next, with just enough flair to disguise the exhaustion. The guillotine may no longer be in service, but politically, the blade is still sharp.
