France Proposes Cutting Two Public Holidays to Avert Budget Crisis

France’s prime minister warned Tuesday that the country faced a Greek-scale financial crisis if it doesn’t act decisively to rein in its ballooning debt and deficit. He proposed a series of drastic measures to mend the nation’s budget, including scrapping two national holidays.

In a sobering speech to lawmakers and members of President Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet, Prime Minister François Bayrou said that France’s debt had risen higher than that of almost every other country in Europe, reaching 114 percent of gross domestic product. Bringing it down in the coming years would require freezing nonmilitary spending and encouraging the French to “work more.”

“It’s the last stop before the cliff, before we are crushed by the debt,” Mr. Bayrou said.

President Trump’s threat to impose 30 percent tariffs on European Union goods posed an additional risk to the French and European economies, he added.

Mr. Bayrou’s spending cuts would include not replacing one out of three civil servants when they retired and eliminating “unproductive” state agencies. He would also scale back France’s subsidies for prescription medicine, saying that the French “consume twice as many antibiotics as the Germans.”

The measure most likely to rankle the French was a proposal to scrap two national holidays: Easter Monday and May 8, which commemorates the end of the Second World War in Europe and is often used as a “bridge” by the French to take a four-day weekend in the middle of spring.

“It’s the entire country going back to work on a day it hasn’t worked for a long time,” he said, adding that the holiday cuts would bring “several billion euros” to French coffers because of higher production. France has 11 national public holidays, the same as the United States.