France’s Prime Minister Francois Bayrou speaks throughout a press convention in Paris on August 25, 2025.
Dimitar Dilkoff | Afp | Getty Pictures
Pricey France,
I simply wished to let you realize at this tough time that I am right here for you.
I am no gloating Englishman sneering from the opposite aspect of the Channel. I genuinely love you and your magnificent nation. I even labored for considered one of your esteemed banks for 5 years again within the nineties and have simply come again from one other nice vacation in your superb nation — a spot I’ve visited for over 40 years, a spot the place my nice grandfather lies to relaxation after combating for liberty. I contemplate myself a Francophile, a buddy.
However all buddies have to be trustworthy with one another, to inform one another residence truths when it is wanted, to confront these awkward moments with out concern of the response.
You let me know the folly of my methods 9 years in the past throughout Brexit. You let me know that we had been taking place a path of self-harm and now it is time for me to return the favor.
Okay, the reality is this may’t go on. You might be superb however not distinctive. It is advisable to notice that you’re tempting destiny by ignoring the truth that you’re residing approach past your means, and it isn’t going to finish effectively.
Fifteen years you bought away with it. The bond markets gave you a move after they had been tearing into Greece, Italy, Eire, and all. On the time I keep in mind pondering, “Why not France? Why aren’t the OAT getting hammered?” I assumed the reply was that you just had been simply too large to fail, that Germany would by no means assist you to endure the identical ignominy that others had been struggling largely in Southern Europe.
However wouldn’t it have completed some good to have gotten the ache over and completed with, again in 2010? Possibly you’d have taken a tough look within the mirror just like the Irish and the Spanish and reappraised your spending, your beneficiant retirement age, your monumental public spending on the time?
As you say adieu to one more prime minister, Francois Bayrou, who fell on his sabre after failing to get 44 billion euros of cuts ($51.8 billion) by the Nationwide Meeting, you realize the following and the following and the following candidates up the ramp for that position will endure an identical destiny until you confront the exhausting truths.
As Bayrou himself put it, “You could have the ability to topple the federal government, however you do not have the ability to erase actuality.”
So, bon likelihood my buddies, and when you find yourself able to be daring and confront the actual world, I might be there for you.
