The Sunday Times, February 3, 2026:
The French are falling behind the north Europeans and are being caught up by those in the east. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Poles will be richer than them within ten years.
While small countries such as Luxembourg and Ireland have a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita that is more than double the European average, if that average is set at 100 then Germany, the bloc’s biggest economy, is ranked at 116, the UK is 99 and France is 98, according to Eurostat’s figures for 2024, the latest available.
As for the Italians, who were 10.1 per cent poorer than the French in 2020, they are now on almost exactly the same footing, a separate study by the European Commission has found. The GDP per capita at purchasing power parity — a measure of income per person accounting for currency differences — is $59,453 in Italy and $59,683 in France.
The figures are all the more striking because the EU as a whole is falling ever further behind the US in terms of economic clout, analysts say. They have provoked an outpouring of despair from commentators, particularly those on the right.
Take, for example, Nicolas Baverez, a prominent essayist and former senior civil servant. Writing in Le Figaro, he said: “Our country has become the Argentina of Europe. France is shut in an infernal spiral that is leading it to third-world status.”
The 2026 budget that parliament approved on Monday does not fill Baverez and other critics with hope of a better future. They say it is made of the ingredients responsible for France’s recent failures: a mixture of high taxes, even higher public expenditure and a growing debt to bridge the gap between the two.
Frédéric Douet, a law professor at Rouen-Normandie University, said Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, was repeating the mistakes of the past.
“The slow pauperisation of France is a consequence of policies that are as costly as they are inefficient,” he wrote in Le Figaro. “The mantra of our technocrats and politicians is that tax rises resolve our problems.”
Lecornu, 39, has admitted that his budget is “imperfect” but said the country was lucky to have one at all. In the absence of a majority in the National Assembly — a result of Emmanuel Macron’s ill-fated decision to call snap parliamentary elections in 2024 — his two predecessors were ousted while trying to pass a budget. ...