Is France heading for an economic storm?

When Prime Minister Michel Barnier unveiled his deficit-reduction plan in October, promising to bring down the public deficit from around 6% of GDP to 3% in 2029, it was seen as an attempt to steer the French economy into calmer waters. 

But on Wednesday, France's parliament rejected his proposal by voting to oust Barnier's government, upending his hopes of avoiding an economic storm. 

For the first time in over 60 years, the National Assembly approved a no-confidence motion, proposed by the hard left and crucially backed by the far right headed by Marine Le Pen.

Lawmakers were reacting to Barnier's decision to link a vote on a part of the 2025 budget — a first step to get the deficit on track to comply with the European Union's fiscal rules — to a special constitutional vehicle, which only allows for bills to be stopped through a motion of censure.

On Thursday, Barnier submitted his resignation, but said he would stay on until a new government is formed.

Before this week's commotion, the prime minister lacked a majority in parliament and headed a coalition government comprising President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party and the conservative Republicans after snap parliamentary elections in July. Macron called those elections after his party came second in June's EU parliamentary elections, receiving less than half as many votes as the far-right National Rally.

What seemed to be Barnier's only way of getting the budget through parliament has now backfired.

Underlying weakness of the French economy

The latest crisis comes at a time when some of the economic indicators have been relatively stable. French GDP is predicted to grow by 1.1% this year while Germany's GDP is expected to shrink by 0.2%. Unemployment stands at 7.4%, which is relatively low for France. Inflation has gone down to about 2% from 5% a couple of years ago.

However, for Denis Ferrand, head of Paris-based economic research institute Rexecode, these relatively good figures can't hide that the French economy has weakened over the past few years.

"French and European companies have become less competitive with Chinese ones, as our production costs have risen by 25% since 2019. They only went up by 3% in China over the same period," he told DW.

Ferrand puts that down to years of high inflation, rising interest rates, and soaring energy prices, especially after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, which he said had led to "a lot of caution."

"We do a quarterly survey amongst bosses of 1,000 French small and medium-sized companies about their investment behavior and, in October, only 36% of them were planning to maintain their investments with 45% saying they'd postpone them and 18% wanting to cancel them," Ferrand said.

"That trend started to emerge at the beginning of the year, but it really gained traction after July's snap parliamentary elections," he added.

A mid-November survey by UK consultancy Ernest & Young (EY) among 200 international company bosses yielded similar results: roughly half of those questioned had downsized or postponed their investment projects. France has been top of EY's investment attractiveness survey in Europe since 2019.

The number of bankruptcies is on the rise

Philippe Druon, a bankruptcy and restructuring lawyer at Paris-based law office Hogan Lovells, confirms that investors are cautious.

"It's very difficult to find buyers for companies that have gone into administration. I currently manage 60 such cases, which is a lot," he told DW, adding that the number of bankruptcies was as high as it was during the 2008 financial crisis.

About 65,000 companies are expected to file for insolvency this year compared to 56,000 last year.

Druon thinks the rise is only partly down to a catch-up effect.

"Many companies now have to pay back loans that the government handed out during the COVID-19 epidemic, but there are also structural reasons such as the transition to electric cars and the fact that there's less demand for office space as many employees now choose to work from home," he said.

"What's more, interest rates on the capital market have been relatively high which makes investing in companies less appealing," he added.

Could France slide into a financial crisis?

And yet, Anne-Sophie Alsif, chief economist at Paris-based consultancy BDO, says these factors on their own wouldn't make for a dramatic economic situation. The political factor, however, does.

"Our macroeconomic figures were about to improve, but if the government falls now and no tailor-made 2025 budget gets voted through parliament, we'll be sliding into an economic crisis. It would be catastrophic," she told DW ahead of the vote.

"We would signal to investors that our country is incapable of implementing a deficit-reduction plan," Alsif stressed.

If the government gets voted out, she said, the 2024 budget will likely be replicated in 2025. "But that was the budget that increased our deficit to over 6%."

"Macron's decision to dissolve Parliament was a monumental mistake. We are now forced to govern our country through coalitions, but we're incapable of that and thus facing an extremely unstable political situation," she added.

Still some investor confidence

Christopher Dembik, an investment advisor at the Paris subsidiary of Swiss-based Pictet Asset Management, has a different view of the situation.

"It's exaggerated to say France is on the brink of a financial crisis. That would mean the country wouldn't be able to refinance its debt, like Greece in 2009, and markets aren't indicating that right now," he told DW.

"Managers of US investment funds have been telling me that they've already taken into account France's political risk in their calculations and France's current spread — the gap in interest rates for 10-year government bonds compared to those issued by Germany — amounts to 0.8 percentage points which is more than acceptable," Dembik said.

France currently pays interest rates of about 3% on these bonds.

Nonetheless, France recently paid a higher rate than Greece for the first time. And up until July's snap elections, the spread only stood at 0.5 percentage points.

As a result, Ferrand fears that France might not be able to avoid a financial crisis.

"Paris has always relied on the fact that it's too big to fail for other European countries," he said. "But people in Brussels are starting to lose patience with our apparent incapacity to bring down public debt."

Edited by: Nik Martin

Editor's note. This article was first published on December 3, 2024, and was updated on December 4 and 5 to reflect the result of the vote in the National Assembly that ousted Barnier's government and his subsequent resignation.