PARIS — French Prime Minister François Bayrou warned on Wednesday that his government’s likely collapse next month would drag France into a dangerous abyss.
“The life of the nation is at stake,” Bayrou said in his first television interview since Monday’s announcement that he would subject his government to a confidence vote over his €43.8 billion budget squeeze designed to bring down France’s massive budget deficit.
“The efforts needed are substantial,” he told French broadcaster TF1. “Our deficits are a threat for whom? For the weakest of the country, for those who are struggling, single mothers with children, and for the young … they will bear the burden.”
The 74-year-old longtime centrist has so far failed to convince the opposition to swallow the bitter medicine he is proposing, a remedy that could assuage French creditors, financial institutions and ratings agencies concerned by the country’s unsustainable levels of public spending.
Bayrou appeared to use the interview to try to reframe the public debate leading up to the vote, which he has scheduled for Sept. 8.
He said he was not asking France’s various political parties to render a judgment on his government, but instead to simply agree on the gravity of the financial perils facing France before embarking on the arduous job of negotiating a slimmed-down budget for next year.
Bayrou said he was willing to negotiate on individual proposals in the budget he unveiled last month, including an unpopular decision to ax two public holidays. But he refused to give ground on what he called “the effort we must make to ensure that France chooses the path of reducing its over-indebtedness.”
“The economic situation is worsening every year in an intolerable way,” he said.
France’s major opposition parties have already said they will vote to bring down the government. While Bayrou acknowledged the math is not in his favor, he expressed optimism that he could bring some of his opponents around to his way of thinking.
“The political parties who said that they would topple the government, I’m sure that in the next 12 days, they might say we spoke a bit quickly, we went too far” he said.
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