France, the sick man of Europe. From out-of-control public debt to riots, Paris is teetering on the brink

“France is on the brink of a dangerous financial spiral,” writes the Wall Street Journal in a lengthy investigation. “The global surge in interest rates has exposed the country – once considered an oasis of relative stability in European financial markets – as one of the continent’s weakest links. France now pays more to borrow than former epicentres of the crisis such as Greece and Italy. Its government has a budget deficit surpassed, amongst comparable countries, only by that of the United States. The cost of French ten-year debt has risen to around five per cent, the highest level since 2002. France has more than one trillion dollars of debt maturing by 2030 and is set to place a record amount of around 380 billion dollars’ worth of bonds on the market next year, against a backdrop where once-reliable sources of demand have dried up. The French central bank is no longer buying government bonds and is instead allowing its portfolio to shrink as the bonds reach maturity. Even once-reliable investors, such as Japanese asset managers, have taken a step back. ‘For years, if not decades, France has been a free rider in Europe; it has got away with what amounts to fiscal murder,’ said Kevin Thozet, a consultant at the French asset management firm Carmignac. ‘It worked as long as nobody noticed. Now people have started to take notice.’ According to a recent study commissioned by the French Ministry of Finance, the cost of debt is expected to rise by 59 per cent by 2030. Interest on the debt is now one of the French government’s largest items of expenditure and, by the end of the decade, could exceed military spending. In recent years, members of the fragmented National Assembly have brought down one prime minister after another whenever attempts have been made to restore fiscal order through spending cuts. With the presidential elections looming in the spring, the leading candidates to succeed Emmanuel Macron – who cannot stand for re-election – are inundating voters with promises to increase public spending. Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate leading in the polls, has promised to raise the retirement age to 60, a measure which, she claims, would cost the state a further nine billion euros a year. Her closest rival in the polls, the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, wants the European Central Bank to freeze or write off the French government bonds held by the Bank of France, worth 488 billion euros. ‘Throw them into the fire,’ Mélenchon quipped. According to some economists, this rhetoric is symptomatic of a country that has lost touch with the reality of public finances. France’s debt woes are rooted in decades of excessive spending to fund a sprawling welfare system, which has accustomed citizens to expecting handouts from the state, particularly in times of crisis. The country has not balanced its budget since 1974. Macron, a former investment banker and technocrat, presented himself as a leader ready to shake up the country and bring it back to reality. He has relaxed labour market regulations, cut corporate taxes and abolished the wealth tax: measures which, according to his camp, have boosted growth and brought the deficit back below the EU’s mandatory threshold of three per cent of GDP in the early years of his presidency.

Over time, however, Macron has resorted to public spending to tackle one crisis after another. The turning point began with the allocation of at least ten billion euros to quell the violent ‘Yellow Vests’ movement. ‘There was an injection of public money, and no one in the government had the courage to pull the plug,’ said Senator Jean-François Husson, a conservative who led a Senate inquiry into spending. France’s debt level could reach 200 per cent by 2050 if spending is not cut, the OECD recently estimated. France is on the brink of a dangerous financial spiral. The factor that could push it over the edge is the upcoming presidential election. Investors fear that neither Mélenchon nor Le Pen are taking France’s financial problems seriously. Investors often describe bond markets as guarantors of financial discipline, citing countries such as Greece that have turned their finances round following painful debt crises.

Charles Rodwell, a centrist MP who sits on the National Assembly’s Finance Committee, said he hoped that market pressure would help bring together people across the political spectrum, adding: ‘We need shock therapy’.”

“For much of last week, the main French news channels opened their broadcasts with images that have become familiar, yet remain frightening to the public,” writes Andrew Hussey, author of Fractured France: A Journey through a Divided Nation (Granta, 2026), in Unherd. “Images of burning rubbish bins, overturned cars, and gangs of masked youths provoking the police and throwing objects at them — firecrackers and Molotov cocktails — as well as attacking firefighters. The police, in heavy riot gear and carrying shields, charged the crowd of youths. They used not only tear gas, but also flash-balls – rubber bullets that constitute a ‘less-lethal’ weapon but are nonetheless highly incapacitating. Furthermore, officers struck indiscriminately with batons. At first glance, there is little that is new: after a decade of street violence, from the Yellow Vests demonstrations to the recent protests against pension reform, via the 2023 riots that followed the police killing of a young North African man in a Parisian suburb, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like images from a war zone. It is, however, the savage nature of the violence perpetrated by young people that has truly shocked people. In Paris, in particular, a young police cadet, on her own, was chased, tripped up and then beaten to the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in north-eastern France, a plainclothes officer was nearly killed by a ‘lynch mob’ — as described by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked him in the head. In Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was struck in the face by a makeshift flamethrower wielded by a laughing schoolboy. Equally disturbing is the alienating, almost incomprehensible way in which the violence, which erupted outside schools across France, from Lille to Marseille, seemed to spring from nowhere. So far, more than a thousand secondary schools have ‘mobilised’, which has meant student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros. Over three thousand arrests have been made, mainly of young people (…) The radical left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is the main challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, which currently leads the polls for next year’s presidential election. The LFI has been courting school-age pupils and teachers for years, with strategies for increased investment and the overhaul of university policies, controversially opening up the prestigious, selective institutions to pupils from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. But this is the first time the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately fuelling subversion. At least, this was the interpretation of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu who, whilst convening a crisis cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that ‘the LFI and its far-left representatives are at the root of this movement’. This accusation was substantiated by an image of the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, cheering and dancing in front of the burning ruins of the Lycée Paul Éluard. There were also calls from LFI activist Ritchy Thibault to ‘march on the Élysée and set it alight’. Police intelligence services have also spent a great deal of time, since early September, monitoring preparations for the unrest on social media, noting, amongst the calls for ‘armed action’, the language of the far left: in particular, ‘the end of neoliberal democracy’, ‘upending the social order’ and ‘challenging state violence’. Mélenchon has been, as ever, fickle, playing both sides. He has called for a ‘peace march’. At the same time, LFI’s rhetoric maintains that in all its forms, from run-down schools to police brutality, ‘state violence is not legitimate’. Students have the right, says Mélenchon, indeed the duty, ‘to take revenge’. France’s current democratic system, says Mélenchon, is rife with ‘white privilege’ and is part of ‘a present that is already obsolete’. He calls for a ‘citizens’ revolution’, driven by the ‘strength of numbers’ and led by the new postcolonial generations to come (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or under). It is no surprise that the student protests are now intertwined with the situation in Gaza, that Palestinian flags are everywhere, and that calls are being made for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively a rewriting of the current Constitution — and ‘a New France’. Mélenchon’s overarching aim is revolutionary: to create a France for the 21st century, built upon its new second and third generations of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but to destroy it entirely.”