That number underlies the crisis. With France’s budget deficit hitting 5.8 per cent of GDP, François Bayrou, the fourth prime minister since 2024, wants to cut €44bn from the ever-expanding budget. Since parliament won’t let him, he’ll probably lose a vote of confidence on Monday. Then on Wednesday, protests and strikes aim to “block” an already blocked country. Why can’t France spend less? And where might this end?
Contrary to popular belief, France’s state wasn’t always massive. At liberation in 1944, many people lived on farms without even rudimentary public services, such as electricity or running water. Pensions used to be ungenerous. In 1970, the effective average age of retirement was 68, exactly the age at which the average French man (in an era when most workers were men) died. In 1995, six governments of developed countries were higher spenders than France.
Then, when the euro arrived in 2002, French politicians calculated that with the European Central Bank printing their money, they could spend with impunity. The prodigality peaked in pensions: French retirement now averages 25 years, about the longest in human history. But spending is also relatively high on health, infrastructure in cities (though not in France’s vast countryside), and — oddly for an obsessively over-centralised country — on local civil servants. Meanwhile, France’s private sector has borrowed merrily too.
French politics is personalised around the figure of the president. After the former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron got the job in 2017, the word “neoliberal” pervaded French discourse. France is now routinely described as a “neoliberal wasteland”, its state supposedly slashed by Thatcherites. In the new post-truth era, other absurd beliefs went mainstream, such as the notion that France was uniquely cursed (as witness world-leading French pessimism in opinion polls) or that it was heading for racial civil war.
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Because France overspends domestically, it can’t afford to help Europe resist Vladimir Putin. Its defence budget is still only 2 per cent of GDP. I recently visited a weapons factory that makes surveillance drones. I imagined it was producing thousands, but was told, “The French military has 14.”