France’s François Bayrou Takes a Chance

Among Western leaders at least one homme sérieux is emerging on the government debt crisis. It’s the French prime minister, François Bayrou, staking his premiership on a bid to cut deficits. He’s scheduled a surprise vote for September 8, putting his job on the line over what he calls the “urgent and indispensable” need to fix France’s fisc. “An immediate danger hangs over us that we must face not tomorrow or the day after, but today,” he says.Félicitations, we say, especially amid carping in the liberal press. A “risky political gamble,” the Times calls Mr. Bayrou’s démarche. One analyst, Vincent Martigny, says the premier is flirting with “political suicide.” Even if it would be préférable for Mr. Bayrou to embrace a supply-side approach to kick-start the French economy with tax cuts and spending reductions, the premier at least deserves credit for taking on a problem that politicians prefer not to ponder.Feature how, at Washington, the Republican Party, once associated with fiscal responsibility, made use of its control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Instead of taking steps to tame the national debt, which has soared past $37 trillion, the party enacted, in the Big Beautiful Bill, a budget that will tack on an extra 4 trillion spondulix to the tab that future generations will need to repay. The interest alone could soon surpass $1 trillion annually. Similarly in France, Mr. Bayrou warns that annual interest on the nation’s debt will reach 66 billion euros this year, up from 60 billion euros, exceeding annual spending on education and defense. Indeed, France’s bloated debt threatens the nation’s security, these columns have noted, by keeping the government from borrowing to boost military outlays. “It’s our freedom that’s at stake,” Mr. Bayrou warns, “it’s our sovereignty and our independence.”The doughty premier, a Béarnais who admires King Henri IV, is roiling the political waters by calling for a degree of austerity. Eliminating two national holidays and freezing pension and welfare benefits are among the wiser elements of his proposal to save money. Less sensible is his call for a “solidarity contribution” of undetermined scope from wealthy citoyens. The measures, per Monsieur Bayrou, are needed to combat a “national emergency.”Yet the premier’s plan has riled both right and left. It’s disappointing to see the National Rally under Marine Le Pen failing to take cognizance of the need for economic reform, including scaling back France’s generous welfare state. This echoes, these columns noted, the errors of her father, who had little interest in low-tax, free-market policies and failed to see that unemployment traces not to “too many immigrants but from too much socialism.”Madame Le Pen avers that members of her party will “obviously vote against the confidence in François Bayrou’s government” and, per the Financial Times, calls for “early elections to break the deadlock” in parliament. That follows the rightist’s opposition to the budget plans of Mr. Bayrou’s predecessor, Michel Barnier, in part because of his support for government benefit trims. In France, it seems, the right is as bad as the left on welfare reform. In remarks published after this editorial went to press, the French finance minister, Eric Lombard, suggested that the financial picture was so bleak that the country could potentially need help from the International Monetary Fund. Though Mr. Lombard later walked back that comment, even the suggestion is a marker of the depths to which France, which once prided itself on the strength of the franc, has fallen of late. All the more reason to cheer Mr. Bayrou’s effort.__________This editorial has been updated to reflect developments subsequent to the bulldog.

France’s François Bayrou Takes a Chance

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