France Is in a Deep, Deep Hole

Opinion|France Is in a Deep, Deep Hole

François Bayrou, France’s fourth prime minister in a year, knew he had trouble ahead. In his inaugural speech in December, he acknowledged “all kinds of difficulties”: a debt mountain, political strife and, alarmingly, “the splintering of society itself.”

So far, he’s at least succeeded in holding a government together. Tasked with reducing a deficit currently over 6 percent of gross domestic product, Mr. Bayrou cleared a major hurdle last week. After much wrangling, he secured the backing of the country’s fractious Parliament for a budget, surviving the no-confidence vote that followed. The sense of relief in the government camp is palpable.

But Mr. Bayrou is not wrong to talk of dangers. In France, malaise is all around: In one recent poll, 87 percent of respondents agreed that the country is in decline. This story is often told in the language of civilizational threat and culture war, amplified by recent conflicts in France’s overseas territories. Fanned by a rising Fox News-style conservative media, the trio of insecurity, immigration and Islam fuels a mounting call to defend a besieged French identity. Even the centrist Mr. Bayrou speaks of a feeling of “submersion.”

The malaise is steeped in economic issues, too, from energy-price inflation and low investment to the weakening of flagship industries. But it has a more fundamental cause: citizens’ declining faith in the state. The much-vaunted French social model, a product of the postwar decades that combined state-led investment, welfare protections and labor rights, is foundering. Its slow capsizal has cast France into a deep hole from which there is no easy exit — and given the far right a major opportunity.

This has been a long-term process. While the pandemic brought a surge in admiration for medical professionals, surveys show that most French people think public services, especially hospitals, are performing poorly. The institutions they say they trust most are small and medium businesses, the army and the police. With services run down and infrastructure suffering from underinvestment — to say nothing of the political dysfunction in Paris — it’s perhaps easy to see why.

The blame doesn’t just belong to President Emmanuel Macron. For decades, governments of both center left and center right have overseen a managed decline of France’s social model. Privatization and pressure on services to be more cost-effective have led to deserts of school and hospital provision, even as politicians blame the lazy and feckless for overwhelming the services that do exist. There are loud calls to abandon the 35-hour workweek — already a fiction for many, especially in the private sector.