Former French prime minister François Bayrou has issued a stark warning that the country is heading for an unprecedented crisis, a looming financial meltdown combined with the risk of a “mortal” second-round presidential contest between Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI).
In an interview on Europe 1 on August 12, 2026, Bayrou said next year’s entire take from income tax would not even cover the interest payments on France’s debt, let alone the capital.
“Next year, the totality of income tax paid by the French will not suffice to pay the totality of the interest on the debt. Not the capital, simply the interest,” he said.
He described a situation without parallel in living memory and one that leaves the nation vulnerable to external creditors. “Never in three quarters of a century has France been in the situation in which it finds itself,” he told the broadcaster.
Bayrou drew a comparison with the aftermath of the Second World War, when France carried debts of a similar order. But at that point, he argued, it had growth and the option of devaluation, tools no longer available inside the euro.
“The financial crisis is inevitable,” he warned.
France closed 2025 with a public deficit of €152.5 billion, or 5.1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), down from 5.8 per cent in 2024, according to the national statistics institute INSEE. Public debt stood at €3,460.5 billion, or 115.6 per cent of GDP.
The Cour des comptes, the State audit body, has projected that debt servicing will approach €84 billion in 2027. France remains under the European Union’s excessive deficit procedure and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government has committed to Brussels to bring the deficit down to 4.1 per cent of GDP that year.
Bayrou, who served at Matignon from December 13, 2024 to September 10, 2025, was himself removed after calling a confidence vote on his austerity-oriented budget plans.
Having presided over a deficit that fell by 0.7 percentage points in a single year, he proposed further savings of €43.8 billion for 2026.
Opposition parties from both left and right combined to defeat him by 364 votes to 194, with 15 abstentions, making his the first government of the Fifth Republic to fall on a confidence vote it had itself requested under Article 49.1 of the Constitution.
He left office insisting he would take no advantages from the post and warning that refusing collective effort would only invite external imposition of discipline.
Bayrou ruled himself out of the 2027 race in June 2026, when he published Alerte sur la France qui vient, a book on the state of the public finances.
He is instead pushing for a broad primary stretching from the Socialists to the Gaullists to select a single candidate capable of blocking what he called the extremes, an idea set out in an interview with Le Figaro on August 10, 2026.
He wants that candidate designated by February and has praised former European commissioner Thierry Breton, citing his experience and his roots in what Bayrou described as the democratic and reformist family.
Early reactions have mostly been refusals.
He argues that the traditional first-round filter of the Fifth Republic no longer works when parties he considers unacceptable are treated as legitimate by large parts of the electorate, and that a fragmented centre risks delivering precisely the worst pairing.
“For many of us, in any case for me, neither LFI nor the RN are acceptable,” he said, accusing the RN of targeting immigrants and LFI of targeting the rich.
Without order, he said, France faces division, scapegoating and a loss of national resilience at a moment of European war on the doorstep and structural Western decline.
“We cannot take that risk, which is a mortal risk,” he said.
Bayrou closed the interview with an aviation image aimed at the field of declared candidates. “You do not hand a Boeing to someone who has never flown, including a glider,” he said, calling for a figure with both the experience to hold office and the capacity to embody renewal.
The presidential election is due in April 2027, roughly eight months away. Parliament returns in September to a budget for that year which the government must steer through a National Assembly with no majority, in the middle of the campaign.
The European Central Bank might have to intervene in France following the fall of prime minister François Bayrou because political instability is worsening and prospects for debt reduction seem less likely. https://t.co/rUCSHWJzMK
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) September 9, 2025
