The Spanish media website (Foz Boboli) reported today Monday that due to demonstrations, strikes, discontent, insecurity, unemployment and declining growth, “France’s outlook can only be bleaker.”
And the newspaper wrote in an article titled “France is dying” that almost twenty years after the publication of “Falling France,” in which writer Nicolas Baverèse described in 2004 an unhappy panorama of France “paralyzed by slowing growth, unemployment, precarious work, strikes, taxes, immigration, insecurity, etc. France, entering the third decade of the century, not only did not solve any of these problems, but, apparently, strengthened and even aggravated them.
The source pointed out that the mass demonstrations against the pension reform project once again reflected in the world the image of France, completely hesitant in any form of change, no matter how necessary, explaining this by the fact that after the first major demonstration on January 19, more than a million people took to the streets again. On Tuesday, February 7, another big mobilization was announced, which will affect transport, education, health, energy, administration and postal services.
And the Spanish media have recorded that any announcement of a reform affecting the very generous French welfare state (more than 80 billion euros in subsidies in the period 2020/21) provokes an angry reaction from a society that still adheres to the idea of ”belonging to rich country that no longer exists.
Fouz Boboli explained: “Today France is a country suffering from a serious disease (…). External debt has now crossed the threshold of 3 billion euros, equivalent to 115 percent of GDP, and has become the third largest economy in the world after the United States and Japan, which are more powerful economies.
The author of the article stated that debt per capita is now approaching 46,000 euros, compared to 40,000 euros in the UK, 37,000 in Greece and 32,000 in Spain. Government spending, the highest in the OECD, exceeds 61 percent of GDP (51.6 percent in the case of Spain, 47.8 percent in Portugal, 42.3 percent in the United States), the government deficit is about 5 percent, and the trade deficit is already exceeded 100 billion euros and continues to grow.
He continued by saying: “France no longer belongs to the wealthy north of Europe to become a full member of Club Med for the countries of the south, victims of governments used to spending recklessly with money that goes far beyond the goods and services they produce.”
The website (Fouz Boupoli) concluded that the old desire of the French to share leadership of the European Union with a strong Germany had faded. A shattered dream, as well as a sense of disappointment left behind in the country of Pasteur and Sanofi, the failure to develop their own vaccine to fight Covid-19 are alarming symptoms of a nation’s decline.
