“The French economy is at a standstill” and will go “into the wall” without a budget, warns Roland Lescure

A way of reassuring while warning the political opposition. Questioned this Friday, October 30 on the Franceinfo set, Roland Lescure made an unequivocal observation. “In 2026, the French economy is at a standstill,” said the Minister of the Economy and Finance, a few moments after INSEE published its figures showing a decline of 0.1% in French gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter.

“It has been three quarters that growth has not been there,” he insisted, while national production had stagnated in the second quarter and declined by 0.2% in the first. “France is not going to crisis”, but “today, if we do not have the budgetary adjustment that we put in the budget, we will go into the wall”, he warned.

While France's borrowing rates on the financial markets had already crossed the 5% threshold last week, never before since 2002, these figures further reinforce the risk of a financial crisis. In this context, the priority is to “restore confidence” to investors, assures Roland Lescure, and this requires first and foremost a “rigorous budget”. He “calls for responsibility” from all political leaders, but also from social partners and union leaders.

“We divide on everything,” he lamented, but “at the dawn of a presidential election, we should be able to come together on the essentials.” Indeed, six months before the country's main electoral deadline, risks are accumulating for France, both domestically, with social anger at its highest, a chronic deficit in public spending and sluggish growth, and on the international scene, from the Strait of Hormuz to Ukraine. “Either we come out of this together, or we enter into this real divided shock, and that will make things worse,” warned the minister, who does not exclude the use of 49-3 or orders to give the country a budgetary copy in the event that the parliamentary debate does not succeed.