France’s Prime Minister Francois Bayrou speaks throughout a press convention in Paris on August 25, 2025.
Dimitar Dilkoff | Afp | Getty Images
Dear France,
I simply wished to let you recognize at this troublesome time that I’m right here for you.
I’m no gloating Englishman sneering from the opposite facet of the Channel. I genuinely love you and your magnificent nation. I even labored for one in every of your esteemed banks for 5 years again within the nineties and have simply come again from one other nice vacation in your wonderful nation — a spot I’ve visited for over 40 years, a spot the place my nice grandfather lies to relaxation after preventing for liberty. I contemplate myself a Francophile, a buddy.
But all pals should be sincere with one another, to inform one another dwelling 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 could’t go on. You are wonderful however not distinctive. You want to comprehend that you’re tempting destiny by ignoring the truth that you might be residing approach past your means, and it isn’t going to finish nicely.
Fifteen years you bought away with it. The bond markets gave you a cross once they had been tearing into Greece, Italy, Ireland, and all. At the time I keep in mind pondering, “Why not France? Why aren’t the OAT getting hammered?” I assumed the reply was that you simply had been simply too huge to fail, that Germany would by no means mean you can undergo the identical ignominy that others had been struggling largely in Southern Europe.
But would it not have carried out some good to have gotten the ache over and carried out with, again in 2010? Maybe 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 huge 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 way of the National Assembly, you recognize the subsequent and the subsequent and the subsequent candidates up the ramp for that position will undergo an analogous destiny except you confront the exhausting truths.
As Bayrou himself put it, “You have the power to topple the government, but you don’t have the power to erase reality.”
So, bon probability my pals, and when you’re able to be daring and confront the true world, I might be there for you.