France spent approximately 1,700 billion euros in 2025. The previous year, the government had announced 30 billion euros in savings. The result: spending increased by 40 billion. This is not a scheduling failure. It is the mechanics of a state whose commitments indexed to inflation, pensions, public sector wages and social minima grow automatically, regardless of declarations of intent.

Agnès Verdier-Molinié, director of the iFRAP Foundation, formulated in 2026 a proposal that few liberal economists have dared articulate as clearly: freeze in nominal terms, for a full year, pensions, public sector wages and social minima. What she calls a “blank budget year.” Not a ten-year structural reform, not a multi-year plan with uncertain effects: an immediate nominal freeze. According to iFRAP’s own calculation, the freeze on major spending items alone (pensions, wage bill, social assistance) produces 16.6 billion euros in savings with 2% inflation, and the total including other measures can exceed 30 billion euros.

The proposal offends French political reflexes. Yet it forces us to examine what Sweden, Germany and Portugal did—and what these experiences reveal about the real conditions for accepting such a measure.

The Essential Points

  • French public spending increased by approximately 40 billion euros in 2025, despite an announcement of 30 billion euros in savings, reaching nearly 1,700 billion euros (iFRAP, 2026)
  • Agnès Verdier-Molinié proposes freezing pensions, public sector wages and social minima in nominal terms for one year; according to iFRAP, freezing major spending items produces 16.6 billion euros in savings with 2% inflation, with total measures potentially exceeding 30 billion euros
  • Sweden, Germany and Portugal each reduced or froze their spending in nominal terms without breaking their social model
  • The French trajectory implies, if uncorrected, that debt servicing could absorb a growing fraction of tax revenues in the coming decade
  • The political question remains open: none of these three countries succeeded without explicit social negotiation and credible countervailing signals

1,700 Billion and the Mechanics of Drift

French public spending represents approximately 57% of GDP, according to INSEE and Eurostat data. This is the highest level in the European Union along with Finland, far ahead of Germany (at approximately 49%) or the Netherlands (47%). But the gross figure is less revealing than the dynamic.

What stands out is the gap between intentions and results. Since 2015, every budget law has announced savings. Since 2015, spending in nominal terms has increased every year, with the exception of 2023 when the inflation base effect temporarily flattered the accounts. In 2025, the gap between the promise (minus 30 billion) and reality (plus 40 billion) reaches 70 billion. This gap is not a sign of political bad faith: it is a sign of a budgetary architecture in which the majority of spending is indexed or protected by vested rights.

The mechanism is simple. When inflation is at 2%, pensions are revalued. Public sector wages are driven by the salary index, now politically delicate to freeze after its long period of stagnation. Social minima are indexed. These three items represent, according to iFRAP, approximately 830 billion euros—pensions (390 billion euros), wage bill (300 billion euros) and means-tested social assistance (140 billion euros)—or approximately 49% of total public spending. Managing the rest is insufficient to inflect the overall trajectory.

François Ecalle, who has been tracking French public finances for years via the Fipeco platform, articulates this precisely: announced savings almost always concern the discretionary portion of spending, that is, the smallest and least visible fraction of the budget. The rest follows its automatism.

What Verdier-Molinié Proposes, and What She Doesn’t Say

The blank budget year consists of suspending indexation mechanisms for twelve months. Pensions are not reduced: they are simply not revalued. Public sector wages do not fall: their automatic increase is suspended. Social minima remain at the previous year’s level.

Agnès Verdier-Molinié’s argument is that this measure is the only technically coherent way to produce savings in the short term without prior structural reform. She emphasizes that structural reforms—pensions, public service, social benefits—have budgetary effects delayed by several years and immediate political costs without guarantee of execution. The nominal freeze, by contrast, produces its effects in the year it is decided.

What she acknowledges, and this is the most honest part of the argument: the measure is regressively neutral in the short term if applied without discrimination. A retiree on the minimum pension loses the same purchasing power, in percentage terms, as a retiree receiving 3,000 euros per month. A Category C civil servant loses as much, proportionally, as a prefectural director general. This formal neutrality masks fundamental inequality. This is what opponents of the proposal highlight first—and rightly so.

The question that immediately follows, then, is: how did countries that succeeded with this type of adjustment make it politically acceptable?

What Sweden Did, and Why It Worked

Sweden in the 1990s is the textbook case of successful fiscal consolidation. In 1993, Sweden’s public deficit reached 12% of GDP. In ten years, the country reversed the trajectory, generated lasting surpluses and maintained its social model. Freezing benefits, sometimes coupled with slight reductions in real value, was part of the adjustment.

What made the measure viable hinged on three concurrent conditions. First, an explicit bipartisan political agreement: governing parties, both right and left, jointly signed the cost-cutting measures, partially removing them from electoral bidding wars. Second, a simultaneous pension reform that introduced individual notional accounts, making the link between contribution and future benefit visible and creating a sense of a revised “fair contract.” Third, communication over time: the Swedish government published ten-year forecasts showing the debt trajectory without adjustment and the trajectory with adjustment. Citizens saw both curves.

This is not merely pedagogy. It is a particular political structure: in Nordic countries, consensus among social partners often precedes parliamentary decision. In France, this channel does not exist in the same form. Unions do not negotiate the overall level of public spending. They negotiate sectoral conditions. Transposing the Swedish model without its institutional architecture means importing the result without the conditions that produced it.

Germany, Portugal and the Path of Gradual Adjustment

Germany, following reunification and the competitiveness crisis of the early 2000s, proceeded differently. The Hartz reforms (2003-2005) transformed the labor market and reduced unemployment benefits, not froze pensions. Budgetary discipline came later, via the “debt brake” constitutionalized in 2009. German adjustment is less about freezing benefits than about reforming their architecture. Savings were realized over time, not in a single blank year.

Portugal offers a more recent case. Between 2011 and 2015, under pressure from the European troika, the country cut public sector wages, pensions and social benefits significantly. Spending fell in absolute value. The political cost was brutal: two successive governments lost subsequent elections. But the country recovered a sustainable debt trajectory. What allowed them to overcome unpopularity: the absence of a credible alternative. Portugal was under an aid program; the margin for refusal was zero.

France is not in this situation. It is far removed from it. This is precisely what makes adjustment more difficult to decide: when crisis is visible, acceptability comes from external constraint. When the trajectory is unsustainable but not yet critical, constraint must come from internal conviction. And internal political conviction is, in France, structurally oriented toward spending.

Debt as an Intergenerational Question

French public spending is, to a significant extent, financed by debt. France’s public deficit reached 5.8% of GDP in 2024 according to Eurostat. Debt approaches 115% of GDP. The interest burden of all public administrations in 2024 was approximately 58 to 60 billion euros, and it is increasing as old bonds, issued at low rates, are renewed at higher rates. By 2027-2028, according to finance ministry projections, the interest burden could exceed 80 billion euros annually.

This figure deserves perspective. Eighty billion is more than the state budget allocated to school education, which amounts to approximately 63.6 billion euros in 2024—even though total education spending across all funders reaches 197 billion. It is an inescapable, unmanageable expense that reduces the policy options available to any future government. Each year without correction strengthens the irreversibility of the constraint for the decades that follow.

Economist Patrick Artus has emphasized this point: maintaining a high structural deficit in France is not socially neutral. It transfers current purchasing power toward holders of government bonds (mainly institutional investors and elderly savers) and places the burden of repayment on future active generations. The distributive argument that justifies not freezing pensions to protect the most modest can thus be turned around: it is also a matter of who pays, and when.

This intergenerational tension is not an argument for austerity. It is an argument for consistency. A state that protects the purchasing power of its today’s retirees by borrowing at rising rates places the bill on workers who do not yet vote or vote marginally. This is a political choice. It deserves to be assumed as such.

The Missing Conditions in France

Agnès Verdier-Molinié’s proposal is technically coherent. It is politically suspended on conditions that France does not meet, and that foreign experiences allow us to identify precisely.

The first condition is the credibility of shared effort. In Sweden, elected officials simultaneously froze their own allowances. Senior civil servants accepted nominal cuts. The freeze on pensions was not a measure targeting “beneficiaries” while “producers” continued their normal progression. In France, the opposite perception is structural: savings are experienced as targeting protected categories while tax expenditures, fiscal spending (estimated at over 80 billion according to the Court of Accounts report) and statutory advantages for elites remain untouched. This perception, whether founded or not, determines the social acceptability of the measure.

The second condition is visible quid pro quo. Portugal suffered but saw the troika leave and rates fall. Sweden saw its social model survive and surpluses return. France has, for now, no mechanism that would make visible the return on investment from a freeze. Where will the savings go? To debt reduction? To energy transition? To education investment? Without explicit answers, the freeze is experienced as a simple drain.

The third condition is the architecture of political agreement. Neither the French left nor right has demonstrated capacity to jointly maintain a multi-year budgetary agreement. Parliamentary fragmentation since 2022 aggravates this problem. A minority government cannot alone bear such an unpopular measure without risking censure before effects materialize.

These missing conditions are not arguments against the proposal. They define the actual nature of the problem: it is not a technical problem, it is a problem of political architecture and institutional trust. France does not lack analysts capable of calculating the necessary adjustment. It lacks mechanisms to transform this diagnosis into collective decision.

What the Data Leaves Open

iFRAP is right about the figures. The Court of Accounts, the European Commission in its country-specific recommendations, and Fipeco converge on the same finding: the current trajectory is not sustainable. The divergence is not on the diagnosis; it is on method and sequence.

Some economists close to smart regulation, like Dani Rodrik, would argue that freezing social minima without simultaneously investing in active employment and training policies amounts to reducing protection without building the alternative. The long-term sustainability of the social model depends less on freezing benefits than on increasing the employment rate, particularly of seniors and women, which remains below Nordic averages in France. This is not an objection to the freeze: it is an objection to a freeze without supporting policy.

Verdier-Molinié’s proposal, taken in isolation, is a treasury measure. It answers the question “how do we gain time and stabilize accounts in the short term.” It does not answer the question “how do we build a sustainable model over a twenty-year horizon.” These two questions are not contradictory. But conflating them would amount to taking the first for the second.

What foreign experiences show, ultimately, is that countries that succeeded in fiscal consolidation without social rupture did not merely freeze: they simultaneously reformed. Sweden transformed its pension system. Germany restructured its labor market. Portugal suffered but rebuilt its competitiveness. The freeze alone is insufficient to reverse a trajectory. It can create the budgetary space necessary for deeper reform—provided that reform exists and is credible.

The real political question for France is therefore not “should there be a blank budget year?” It is “what reform is it ready to conduct simultaneously, and with which actors, so that the freeze is the beginning of a turnaround rather than a simple postponement of the problem?”

Sources

  1. Agnès Verdier-Molinié, “Faire une année blanche est la seule option crédible possible,” iFRAP Foundation, 2026 — https://www.ifrap.org/budget-et-fiscalite/agnes-verdier-molinie-faire-une-annee-blanche-est-la-seule-option-credible-possible
  2. Eurostat, data on public finances of EU member states (deficits, debt, spending as % of GDP), 2024-2025 — eurostat.ec.europa.eu
  3. Fipeco (François Ecalle), notes on French public finances — fipeco.fr
  4. Court of Accounts, report on tax expenditures, 2024
  5. Ministry of Economy and Finance, finance bill 2025, annexes on debt burden
  6. INSEE – APU Accounts 2025 (March 2026) — https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8956575
  7. INSEE – APU Accounts 2024 (March 2025) — https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8540375
  8. Fipeco – Public finances of eurozone countries 2024 — https://www.fipeco.fr/commentaire/Les%20finances%20publiques%20des%20pays%20de%20la%20zone%20euro%20en%202024
  9. Fipeco – Interest burden of public debt — https://www.fipeco.fr/fiche/La-charge-dint%C3%A9r%C3%AAts-de-la-dette-publique
  10. National Assembly – Ministerial response on debt burden 2028 — https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/q17/17-9931QE.htm
  11. Senate – PLF 2025 Report (finance commission) — https://www.senat.fr/rap/l24-144-1/l24-144-14.html
  12. Wikipedia – Agnès Verdier-Molinié — https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agn%C3%A8s_Verdier-Molini%C3%A9