--- title: "The French Protesters Are Right: France is Broken." description: "Fronts video analysis of The French Protesters Are Right: France is Broken, with context on conflict, defense, and security." url: https://fronts.co/videos/the-french-protesters-are-right-france-is-broken.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/the-french-protesters-are-right-france-is-broken/ datePublished: 2026-10-23T19:00:08.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-23T19:00:08.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/the-french-protesters-are-right-france-is-broken-5d45228a.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4829 --- In the nation of France, there are a few unofficial human rights that simply cannot be infringed. The right to cheese, the right to wine, and the right to take to the streets and express some difficult emotions. This month, the French have been on a "bender" with well over half a million people marching in a single day as protests against high-living costs, poor schooling conditions, and a housing crisis deteriorated into rats and looting. The French are hardly blowing things out of proportion either. Life is quite difficult right now for ordinary French citizens and the nation's government has struggled badly to address the concerns of its people. There's going to be another round of protests this weekend, and perhaps those protests will be underway by the time you see this episode. There are no guarantees that those protests will remain orderly, and French law enforcement clearly believes that there's a strong likelihood that they'll give way to further violence. But underneath the cost of living concerns, underneath the fuel prices and department costs, and underneath the immediate concerns that have made the French so furious, there is a much deeper layer of rot, festering at the heart of the country. This is a place that should be doing very well, where its people should be able to feel as if they live in one of the world's wealthiest nations, which on paper they do. Yet in practice, France is deeply politically polarised, barreling toward long- term financial crisis and at risk of detonating the entire Eurozone. The grievances that have pushed the French out onto the streets are entirely legitimate and deeply felt, but there are also a set of symptoms, and those symptoms are getting worse because of the progression of a much larger disease. A Failed Balancing Act Of all the long-term issues that France is dealing with, there is none quite so central as what the Spanish outlet Al Pius called "the country's moment of economic strangulation, runaway debt levels, weak growth, and cuts to the public system." And at the very core of France's economic catastrophe lies the nation's debt crisis. As analyst Pierre Ochangari explained for EuroNews this month, quoting, "For most of the vast decade, lending money to France was considered almost as safe as lending money to Germany. That belief is now breaking down, and it is happening fast," end quote. The fundamental problem here is that French government spending has far out paced its revenues year over year, and every year Paris covers its budget deficit by borrowing money that it can't pay back. Of course, it's not the end of the world of a country runs a budget deficit in a given year. Ideally, a country stays in the green, but if it wobbles back and forth from deficit to surplus to deficit to surplus, then that's fine too. But France's last general budget surplus was all the way back in, wait for it, 1974, and recently the scale of the deficit has only been increasing. The European Union sets a limit, at least in theory, that nations can't have an annual deficit over 3% of gross domestic product or GDP, but in France, this year's deficit is expected to reach as high as 5.4%, which is nearly double the EU's allowed maximum. That's getting close to the United States' territory, where the deficit for the fiscal year 2025 was around 5.9%. But whereas the United States takes the interesting economic approach of stra pping its citizens into a bus, pointing that bus toward a cliff and letting the politicians in the drivers seat floor is while assuring their passengers that there's nothing to worry about. France is in a somewhat different position. In America, the proverbial passengers sit in their proverbial bus seats, mut tering unhappily, but generally doing as they're told, partly because there's still an institutional belief running through the global economy, that the US can eventually pay back its debt, and partly because the US is so critical to the world economy that it is simply too big to fail. France doesn't enjoy either of those advantages. It's big enough to be a cornerstone of the euro's own. Nice. Right, by the way. But it's also only one of five euro's own countries with a nominal GDP over a trillion dollars, and it's not even the biggest of the five. The bigger problem, however, is that France's investors don't trust that the country can pay down its debt, or even reliably lower its deficit. Back in June, France's ruling government presented a draft budget for 2027 that would have cut the deficit down to 5%, partly by raising taxes, and partly by slashing spending on pensions and healthcare. Usually, that's the kind of spending plan that would calm investors, but in this case, it only made the panic worse. In the four-year stretch from 2023 to 2026, France has hit a budgetary target once, and experts were clear that they didn't believe Paris could live up to its commitments this time around. The government was promising a big deficit card, while exempting defense spending in a period of rearmament, while also having to respond to rising interest payments, meaning that the actual cuts Paris would have to make would need to be enough to offset all of that extra spending and then make a deep cut into the deficit. To do that, the government would have to get its spending cuts approved at a time when France's leadership doesn't have a parliamentary majority, and when nobody wants to be seen endorsing tax hikes or spending cuts with less than a year to go before the presidential elections of spring 2027. This has become a pattern with France, and given the immense domestic and global economic pressures of 2026, investors are not willing to give Paris any benefit of the doubt. Their low confidence has caused French borrowing costs to spike, and this summer interest rates on the country's 10-year bonds soared higher than they have since July of 2002, a higher interest rate than the Greek economy faces in 2026, after Europe spent most of the 2010s rescuing Athens from complete economic collapse. Germany, the nation that France had long competed against when luring investors, has now surged way ahead. And because France is such an important linchpin of the euro zone and the wider European economy, its troubles have led to both a weakening of the euro and a surge in concern over the risk of spillover and wider collapse. We should be very clear, of course. At this point, it's unlikely that France's debt crisis would trigger a collapse across the euro zone. But the simple fact that we have to ask that question in the first place about France shows how far the country's economic prestige has fallen. And the problem is made so much worse because of the way that France spends on its pensions and its welfare programs. In recent history, France is a very good place to be a retiree, with a person who transitions into a post-career reliance on government pensions receiving over 70% of what they made pre-retirement. Compare that to say Germany, where state pensions provide around 48% of the average monthly income of someone with a standard full career, or Belgium, where the figure is roughly 61%. The nation's retirement age is 62 years and nine months old at a time when the nation's average life expectancy suggests men should live to age 80 and women to age 85. But the country's fertility rate is at its lowest level since 1918. Back in 2010, less than 17% of the French population was aged 65 or older, a manageable ratio of retirees to working-aged people. Today, 22% of French people are elderly, and that proportion is going to keep on rising until it tops out in the 2070s at around 33%. That demographic crunch means that the pool of people France can tax is steadily shrinking, relative to the pool of people that France has to use its tax income to support. But the larger issue with France's approach to welfare and pensions is that Paris uses an unusually high share of its overall GDP to support its social programs. In total, around 32% of the nation's GDP funnels into social protection spending, as opposed to the European Union average, of around 27%. And keep those figures in mind, because there lies the core problem that makes change so difficult. Fiscal quicksand. At the very heart of France's economic troubles is the fact that a very high and growing share of France's GDP has already spoken for year after year and decade after decade. France has been able to pay for its generous pensions and its other social protections, because the country's leaders have prioritised those social protections over the importance of creating a relatively standard level of flexibility within the French budget. Whatever France has available, after interest payments, defence spending, education and various other essentials are covered, it funnels towards social programs, and now that the social programs are getting more and more costly, Paris has grown its deficits to make up the gap. As a result, the nation's debt to GDP ratio has never been high, 119% as of the time of writing, and expected to climb as high as roughly 125% by 2030 or even earlier. So France just doesn't have very much money to spare when problems inevitably start to crop up. People have brought protesters out onto the streets in such high numbers, are all solvable, and in fact, it's the very fact that these problems have solutions that's made it so frustrating when Paris refuses to implement any of them. France's teacher shortages and its crumbling schools could be fixed by training and hiring more teachers, subsidising pay rises to lure more people into the profession and dedicating the money required to fix the buildings. The nation's housing crisis could be addressed by building more housing through government programs, renovating existing buildings or providing direct housing assistance, but France just doesn't have the excess money available to be able to implement those reforms, especially when other more imminent problems take priority. In 2026, the money that France did have available for emergency spending has mostly been allocated to help truckers, farmers, and other groups deal with rising energy costs. And while, in a healthier economy, France could see its housing education or cost of living problems as an extenuating circumstance in which it's worth running up the deficit, France already ran up the deficit more than it could get away with. Borrowing more under the current circumstances would be an extremely risky endeavor. France's protesters are trying to make their message heard, that it's worth the risks to try and fix the problems anyway. After all, the risks of inaction clearly include riots in the street, the burning and vandalism of historic buildings, and the estimated US$1.3 billion worth of damages we've seen from these protests already. But French leaders are unwilling to agree and unwilling to take the risks that ordinary citizens clearly deem necessary because of the political limitations that make these problems even worse. France is a hyperpolarised society right now, and as we've mentioned, it is a nation barreling toward a presidential election next year, for which there is no clear front one. After French President Emmanuel Macron called for snap elections in 2024 that turned out to be a disaster, the country has been divided into three political blocks of roughly equal size. The centrists, like Macron, who control the government but don't wield a majority, alongside the far right, led by the National Rally's Marine Le Pen, and the far left, led by Jean-Luc Melanchon, of France Unbout. Both the far left and the far right have key advantages. They have momentum in the polls, they have clear leadership with a clear vision, and they have highly motivated sport bases. But they also have key disadvantages that make them either unable or unwilling to contribute to much needed political changes. For one thing, neither of them is actually in charge. For another, the far right and the far left have significant internal divisions and strategic disagreements of their own. But the worst problem of all, in a purely tactical sense, is that neither of them is anywhere close to an outright majority of voters' support in an environment where voters are ready to be outraged at anybody who gives them a reason to be upset. Both the far left and the far right understand that they remain strong right now, when they can harness and express the voters' outrage as part of the opposition, and they both understand that it would be very easy to tank their political prospects unnecessarily by getting behind measures that might be necessary, but that would be deeply unpopular with a large share of the population. Instead, the far left is pledging a vast expansion in social spending. The far right is pledging deep budget cuts, and neither of them is willing to compromise in a way that the ruling centrists could get behind. But Macron and the centrists can't take the lead, because every body in France knows, including them, that they are dead in the water. The president's governing philosophy of macroinism originally held up as a way to bridge the divide across the political right and left has instead been a deep disappointment for everyone. The French government has collapsed repeatedly in the last few years, and the centrists can cite only a feeble legislative record after their time in office. There are a few names in circulation who could try to rally the centrists, like Gabriele, Atal, and Edoard Philippe, both former prime ministers under Macron, or the center-left candidate Raphael Gluxman. But none of them stand out, and each of their bases of support has been a little too successful at tearing each other's candidates down, while not being successful enough and explaining why any of them would be a good option. As more and more people in France become disillusioned, they're driven away from the status quo, and right now the centrists are pledging a continuation of the status quo, even if they write those pledges in slightly different fonts. According to the latest polls, it's far-rightly pared and far-left Melanchor, who would advance to a run-off if the first round vote happened today. So the centrists don't have the political power to pass any reforms by themselves, and they're seen as a dead-ideology-walking, meaning that there's no reason for France's more polar parties to support anything they suggest. Instead, the far-right and the far-left are incentivized to remain staunch members of the opposition, and to soak up political support by being loud, obstinate, and committed to a vision of radical reform to improve French society. And that political inflexibility has another knock-on effect. Even when reforms might help address the protesters' concerns without spending very much more money, those reforms rarely garner the political support to move forward. Take the housing crisis, for example. France could change its laws to bring millions of existing housing units that are being held empty back into the market, but in a time of broad discontent just before an extremely high-stakes presidential election, no political party wants to take that leap and expose itself to the potential blowback. But across this entire episode, you may have noticed that we haven't even mentioned the "I" word, and if you didn't notice, then scroll down to the comments, because you'll probably find a lot of upset people who did. The "I" word, of course, is immigration. And depending on who you listen to, you might be convinced that immigration is practically unrelated to the protests, or that it is the sole reason that France burst into flames. In France, Marine Le Pen has been careful not to couch the protests in strictly racial terms, instead describing, quote, "by greatery, budgetary, and security chaos," and claiming that the French government's failures have led to, quote, "an arctic migration." The global hard-right, however, has been much more direct. U.S. President Donald Trump called for France to close its borders, and claimed, at a rally, that France was being, quote, "conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists who hate Christianity," end quote. Germany's Alice Vidal of the AFD described, quote, "dangerous mix of mass migration and left-winning extremism." While Peter Magyar of Hungary said online, "In the face of this senseless destruction and unjustified violence, perhaps it is now clear to everyone why Hungary advocates the strictest possible approach to migration," end quote. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself facing election within the next week, still chose to weigh in, calling the riots a, quote, "invasion of extremist Islam." Emmanuel Macron, of course, has been pushing back, as he explained the press on Wednesday, quote, "We've had people claiming that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists, so which is completely false," end quote. Although the role of migration in these protests, if any, is still the subject of a fierce global debate, France's deeper problems have little to do with what's happening on its borders. The country's debt crisis, its pension and social protection programs, and its inflexible approach to finance, are vastly greater problems all coming together to create a situation where France can hardly respond to any new problem, be it a global energy crisis, a spike in the cost of living, or a student protest over the conditions of schools. But those same fundamental problems have also created the conditions necessary for immigration to become such a polarizing issue, because they've created the conditions for any issue to easily become polarized. When a government is this inflexible, when it's unable to address the rising problems that make ordinary people's lives harder, it creates an exceptionally thin margin of error for people just trying to get by. Far too often, the people of France just don't have room for anything else to go wrong, so when things do go wrong, under a government that's resolutely refused to reform when it needed to, the response is outrage. Compared to the damage caused by France's overspending and economic mis management, the impact of immigration is marginal. So is the damage caused by, say, a global rise in gas prices, or a teacher shortage, or a spike in the cost of a rental apartment? Each of those subtropping the bucket compared to the far larger underlying problems of the modern France, but when ordinary people are dealing with razor thin margins of survival in their own lives, the impact of a new marginal problem might be enough to bring that person's whole world toppling down. So when that person responds without rage and takes to the streets, French leaders just don't get to be surprised. Thank you for watching.