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This week

• 🏛️Lecornu reaching limit as savings tax leaks

• 📉Lescure lowers French growth outlook

• ✈️France moves on from FCAS with new Rafale

🏛️Lecornu reaching limit as savings tax leaks

Starting off the week: the French government is currently suffering a headache over the incoming budget negotiations for 2027, with one leaked proposal creating an uproar that Sebastien Lecornu’s Matignon had to spend Monday distancing itself from.

The big proposal was to tax employee savings to help plug the 2027 social security budget, in a government still without a parliamentary majority and running out of room to manoeuvre before next year’s presidential election.

This also comes as bubbling exasperation grows over the obsessive protection of pensions in France, with stories regularly emerging about retirees earning more, sometimes by a substantial amount, than people in full-time roles. Presidential candidates have also been working to court a pensioner vote, offering whatever they can.

The story began with Les Echos, which reported that the government was weighing new social contributions on profit-sharing bonuses, participation payments and employer top-ups to savings plans. Each of the three mechanisms would reportedly retain its own 3,000-euro exemption, assessed separately, with only amounts above that threshold subject to new contributions.

Economy minister Roland Lescure confirmed as much on RTL that morning, calling it “part of the tracks we’re looking at, like others.” By evening, Matignon was drawing a sharper line, telling reporters that Sébastien Lecornu had “never spoken in favour” of the idea.

He was not simply managing a bad headline. Le Parisien reported that Lecornu “was starting to have enough, you could feel it,” according to one minister close to the Prime Minister, who added: “we’re at a point where we should all have an interest in helping Lecornu get this budget through.”

The PM’s office, naturally, argued that the leak had gotten ahead of the process: “What leaked is a working document, not a government decision,” Matignon said, adding that “ministers hadn’t validated it either” and reminding everyone that the civil service was constantly testing dozens of options “precisely so the prime minister can then accept, modify or discard them” as part of an intellectual exercise to find a path forward.

More strikingly, Matignon announced it had referred the leak of these “internal works” to the Paris public prosecutor under article 40 of the code of criminal procedure, the provision obliging officials to report suspected crimes.

Lecornu’s entourage was careful to draw a line around who exactly was in the crosshairs: “The press is not the target,” Matignon told Le Parisien, “journalists are doing their job.”

Lecornu himself had already made his irritation known on X, writing that having “working information, some of which never even reached Matignon, sometimes liable to directly touch on economic or patrimonial interests,” turn up in the press was “not trivial. It’s serious, even,” and that arbitrages would be announced only once they had actually been made. The detail that some of what leaked never reached Matignon at all points the finger lower down the chain than ministers.

The justification leaned on market sensitivity rather than simple embarrassment, and the stakes were not hypothetical. France’s 10-year borrowing rate hit 4.25% on Monday, its highest since 2008, with markets weighing a debt load above €3,500 billion, a fresh €310 billion in bonds due to be issued this year, and annual interest charges above €77 billion.

Matignon tied its own reasoning explicitly to this backdrop: premature disclosure, it warned, was “likely to affect the country’s economic life,” pushing businesses and individuals toward investment decisions “based on erroneous information.” “The overall framework for preparing the budget cannot be disconnected from the context in which France borrows on financial markets,” Matignon added, warning that “any needless swing in rates could, in turn, cost every French person,” and that the leaks potentially amounted to “abuse of trust or a breach of professional secrecy.”

If anything, Matignon suggested, Lecornu’s actual instinct runs the other way. Rather than taxing employee savings, the government wants to explore “how to temporarily let employees more freely access savings they’ve already built up.” This is presumably also to give French citizens a little more economic freedom at a time when the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the American war in Iran, and inflation are battering French wallets.

To that end, Matignon reiterated its backing for a bill from LR senator Olivier Rietmann, passed by the Senate in the spring, that would allow employees to draw down up to €5,000 from their savings plans. The PM has asked the minister for relations with parliament to schedule its passage through the National Assembly, in keeping with the value-sharing measures introduced under Macron.

Medef was not waiting to find out how the arbitrage would land. The employers’ federation came out against the tax idea on Monday, insisting employee savings were not “a budgetary reserve” but “the fruit of labour and of collective success.” It called on the government to strike the option from the social security financing bill, arguing it was incoherent to preach better value-sharing while “making these arrangements less advantageous for employees as for employers.”

The episode sits inside a wider budget squeeze. With public finances under strain and growth weak, Lescure said savings would instead have to come from “operating expenses of the state, local authorities, social security administrations, all public agents,” and repeated that Lecornu “doesn’t want a new tax, an additional tax increase.”

Lecornu used the RTL interview to needle opposition parties threatening to censure the budget, contrasting the comfort of opposition with the burden of government: “It’s easy today to say: frankly, this budget, I don’t like it, I’m censuring it,” warning that a country without a budget would eventually hit a wall, “with interest rates rising very sharply” for households.

However, Lecornu’s allies were unimpressed by the whole situation. Frédéric Valletoux, the Horizons MP who chairs the National Assembly’s social affairs committee and had publicly opposed the tax idea along with much of the bloc central, called the climbdown “a wise announcement” in comments to Le Parisien, before adding a complaint of his own: “these trial balloons we keep launching are tiresome, this way of doing things ends up being tiresome, and it gives the impression the government is a bit cornered.”

What stands out is not the tax idea itself, killed off before it reached a minister’s desk, but the reach for article 40. Reporting a leaked working document to the prosecutor is a heavy-handed tool for what is, on Matignon’s own account, an unremarkable stage of budget drafting: officials constantly float and discard options.

Valletoux’s own aside, that the government looks “a bit cornered,” is close to confirmation from inside the coalition of what the manoeuvre otherwise only implied. A government running month to month without a majority has little appetite for its internal arbitrages being narrated in real time, particularly when the option in question would have handed the opposition, on the left and at the RN, a ready-made tax increase to campaign against ahead of what will be decisive presidential elections for the French economy.

That is presumably the real logic behind steering toward the Rietmann bill instead: letting people unlock savings they already hold costs nothing to sell and echoes the value-sharing bonus Macron championed in his own presidency.

📉Lescure lowers French growth outlook

France’s finances took another hit on Friday, when finance minister Roland Lescure confirmed the country will grow less than expected this year and miss its own budget deficit target, complicating an already precarious path to getting the 2027 budget through a deeply divided parliament before next spring’s presidential election.

Lescure cut the government’s 2026 growth forecast to 0.5% from 0.7%, while leaving the 2027 projection unchanged at 1.0%. “This year has been marked by extreme crises involving four different types of shocks,” the minister told reporters, listing domestic political uncertainty, surging energy prices, extreme summer weather and a jump in borrowing costs on bond markets as primary reasons for the change.

The deficit target is now firmly out of reach for this year, with the government having planned to bring the shortfall down to 5.0% of GDP, a goal built on assumptions that the weaker growth outlook has quietly demolished.

“The reality is that the budget was built on a 5% assumption. And the reality is that, today, 5% is no longer an option,” Lescure said. He did not offer a replacement figure, saying only that the government was still finalising the budget bill it is due to present to parliament at the end of the month.

Markets have already drawn their own conclusions. As the deficit target slipped away, the premium France pays to borrow over ten years, relative to Germany, widened to its highest since 2012.

And what’s worse is that polls are pointing to a possible presidential run-off between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, meaning investors are bracing for the economic situation to become even more complicated and for the spread to widen even further. “I think we are at the foothills of something more concerning for France,” James Athey, a fixed income manager at Marlborough in London, told Reuters: “The spread at the moment is not pricing all the risks. It is not pricing a Le Pen or Melenchon presidency.”

Lescure pinned part of the blame on forces outside the government’s control. The economic fallout from the American war in the Middle East, currently stuck in a quagmire as Iran resists and the Houthis run riot, along with summer heatwaves and drought that hit agricultural output, dragging down growth and pushing the fiscal targets further out of reach. “I think it is reasonable to say that economic uncertainty has never been greater than it is today,” he said. “We are operating under tight budgetary constraints; there is no more fat to trim.”

The borrowing costs are not abstract. Investors have started treating France as one of the weaker links in a broader global bond selloff, a judgment rooted in weak public finances and a now familiar pattern of missed deficit targets.

Lescure insisted France still has no trouble issuing debt, though he conceded it costs considerably more than it used to, calling the risk premium over German bunds “too high.” The bill for that premium is concrete: debt servicing will cost France €65 billion this year, €4.5 billion more than originally budgeted, and now the single largest line item in the entire budget.

Taken together, the numbers describe a government trying to pass an unpopular budget through a parliament with no majority, while the market backdrop against which it is negotiating keeps getting worse.

A growth downgrade and a missed deficit target would be awkward in any year. Arriving months before an election where the two candidates furthest from fiscal orthodoxy are polling strongest, they read as a warning the bond market is already pricing in political risk the government has yet to publicly reckon with.

This is less a new story than the same one deepening. Three weeks earlier, Fitch had kept France’s rating at A+ but flagged “persistent political fragmentation” as a “major weakness” that “reduces the authorities’ capacity to implement a durable budgetary adjustment,” while INSEE was quietly revising second-quarter growth down to a flat 0.0%, putting the country within a whisker of a technical recession. Friday’s downgrade and missed deficit target read less like a shock than confirmation of what the rating agency and the national statistics office had already been pricing in.

You can read about these in the following link:

The government keeps finding technical language to describe each threshold it hasn't crossed yet — not a recession, not a new tax, not a downgrade, and each time, the language survives a little less contact with the numbers underneath it as the French continue to ask what exactly is going on

Plus, you can almost hear Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon rubbing their hands together.

✈️France moves on from FCAS with new Rafale

So, to wrap up the week: as France competes to court Swedish company SAAB to fill in the FCAS project, the French government is working on a new configuration of its famous Rafale fighter jet.

For some background knowledge, here’s an in-depth post-mortem on the FCAS Scandal:

France is accelerating work on the Rafale F5 standard, as TWZ’s Thomas Newdick reported this week, bringing forward the development of a major new configuration of its combat aircraft; at the same time, its planned next-generation fighter with Germany has effectively collapsed in its original form.

The French defence procurement agency, the DGA, has ordered the first upstream development work for F5 from Dassault Aviation, Thales, MBDA and Safran, covering the equipment judged to carry the highest technical risk: navigation, datalinks, radar, electronic warfare and propulsion, ahead of the overall F5 development contract expected by the end of this year.

The DGA confirmed the order on X, listing the inertial navigation system, engine, radar, and self-protection suite as the first areas to be covered.

The F5 was originally conceived as a bridge, keeping the Rafale relevant until the Franco-German New Generation Fighter (NGF) was finally developed and became France’s principal crewed combat aircraft. However, with the now well-known scandal having killed the FCAS, the F5 will be expected to take on a far larger role in the meantime: rather than a stopgap, it is being built to carry French tactical aviation through the 2030s and potentially beyond, entering service with the Air and Space Force, as well as the French Navy, from sometime around 2033.

The scope reflects that shift: previous Rafale standards were largely incremental, software and systems tweaks to an existing configuration. The F5 goes considerably further, rebuilding how the aircraft senses the battlespace, communicates and defends itself.

The centrepiece is Thales’s RBE2-XG radar, built around gallium nitride semiconductors that the DGA says will deliver “a substantial increase in power, and consequently in detection range, as well as improvements in the identification of targets with an extremely low radar cross-section,” with computing capacity enhanced to support AI integration and sensors “designed with collaborative combat in mind.” MBDA and Thales are also separately overhauling the SPECTRA self-protection suite through, in the DGA’s words, “a fully digital approach, enabling a complete overhaul of the core electronic warfare system” to counter threats expected to be common by 2035, while Thales’s new Inter-Vehicle Data Link is meant to let the Rafale “penetrate hostile areas where jammers are widespread, while maintaining optimal quality of communication.” Safran, meanwhile, will begin design work on an upgraded M88 engine intended to boost thrust by roughly 20%.

On the weapons side, the F5 is set to carry the ASN4G, a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile with a range beyond 1,000 kilometres, keeping the Rafale as France’s airborne nuclear delivery platform, alongside a new beyond-visual-range missile under MBDA’s Comet programme meant to succeed Meteor around 2030.

As Newdick noted, the programme also lets France sidestep NGF’s now-defunct joint structure altogether, freeing it from having to negotiate requirements, industrial structure, and workshare with Berlin on a single aircraft. Working alone, France can fold in NGF-era concepts, crewed fighters operating alongside drones, remote carriers and offboard sensors, without needing Germany’s agreement on any of it.

A heavily upgraded Rafale, serving as the crewed controller for uncrewed combat aircraft, has the potential to deliver much of what the NGF was meant to deliver. However, with the Rafale airframe dating back to 1980, experts and observers will also continue to ask themselves how long the fourth-generation Rafale fighter jet can underpin the French strategy for air superiority, especially as fifth- and sixth-generation fighters continue to be developed and will begin to be deployed in combat zones.

There's an industrial logic underneath this too, outside the purely military picture: Dassault, Thales, Safran and MBDA, the same four companies that would have formed the backbone of the French lead on FCAS, are now the ones building the F5 together, and keeping that partnership and its expertise intact for whatever comes next, whether that is a future crewed fighter, an uncrewed combat platform built on lessons from the nEUROn programme, or both, is essential for the French effort.

Britain, Italy and Japan are already pushing ahead with their own GCAP programme, and Germany and Spain remain tied to the wider FCAS architecture even without France, though Germany in particular has reportedly been pushing to escape it and join GCAP instead, with Italy said to be open to the idea.

There’s a domestic subtext worth noting too. This commitment lands in the same week Roland Lescure was insisting there is “no more fat to trim” in the budget, and just three weeks after Fitch cited extra defence spending commitments as one of the reasons it revised France’s own deficit forecasts upward.

Out of everything on the table this budget season, defence procurement (alongside pensions) is the one line item that keeps expanding, regardless of who is in government or how tight the fiscal picture gets, a rare point of consensus in a parliament that agrees on almost nothing else.

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👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

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This week

• 🧑‍⚖️Dati asks to rejoin the judiciary ahead of her corruption trial

• 💰Ciotti lobbies Le Pen for capitalisation in pensions

• 🇺🇦Bardella trips over Ukraine position

🧑‍⚖️Dati asks to rejoin the judiciary ahead of her corruption trial

So, to start off the week: as Rachida Dati waits for 16 September, where she will be tried for corruption before the Paris Criminal Court on charges of corruption and passive influence peddling, she has made an interesting request.

Having not held any position as a judge or prosecutor since 2002, when she initially entered into politics as Nicolas Sarkozy’s advisor, Dati has asked to be reinstated to the judiciary

Since the request was made, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed it will do so upon resolution of her case.

“Ms Dati has requested her reinstatement as a judge, as is her right, and will shortly be assigned in accordance with the standard transparency procedure for judges … that is to say, following the advice of the High Council for the Judiciary, which the Minister for Justice will follow”

- Statement by the Chancellery of the Ministry of Justice

However, the question is whether or not she would legally be able to reintegrate into the judiciary following the corruption judgment, which is linked to her time as an MEP when she was accused of illegal lobbying for Renault and former boss/internationally wanted criminal, Carlos Ghosn, who is currently hiding out in Lebanon.

Dati was apparently even paid €900,000 through lawyers between 2009 and 2013, and you can read more about the issues here:

💰Ciotti lobbies Le Pen for capitalisation in pensions

Sticking with the right, Eric Ciotti used his political rentrée on Saturday 5 September, in his Nice stronghold, to pressure Marine Le Pen toward pension reform, even as he widened the gap with her over Ukraine.

Held on a field in Levens in the Alpes-Maritimes, the event drew a supposed 6,000 people, more than double the turnout of previous years, who were all fed pan-bagnats and rosé.

Several dozen local mayors attended, along with the Alpes-Maritimes department president, Charles-Ange Ginésy, all jostling to support Ciotti’s campaign and to position themselves. Leading figures of the Rassemblement National (RN) on the Côte d’Azur also attended, presumably keeping an eye on one of their main vote silos for the second round of the Presidential elections.

Especially now that he has little chance of winning a strong post following a potential Le Pen victory.

Two months ago Ciotti looked like a plausible prime minister for a Bardella presidency; however, this was all thrown up in the air by the July 7 appeals court ruling that convicted Marine Le Pen while restoring her eligibility. Ciotti suddenly found himself bumped down the pecking order, which cost him a candidate more sympathetic to his free-market instincts and a straight line to Matignon.

Ciotti hasn’t dropped the fight, however, and he continues to call for a funded, capitalisation-based pillar in the pension system, implicitly criticising Le Pen’s near-status-quo stance and the RN’s own vote to suspend the Borne reform.

“Our pension system is under threat and won’t hold up any longer (...) The deficits are widening, demographic change is here, yes we must change the system. (...) An alliance also feeds on differences: yes, I think we will need to work more, and I say it again to Marine Le Pen, we will need to introduce a dose of funded pensions for our retirement system.”

- Ciotti speaking in Nice on Saturday 5 September 2026

Ciotti’s camp continues to hope Le Pen hasn’t closed the door, with sources close to him saying he spent several hours this week discussing the issue with her directly, with plans to continue lobbying for his favoured policy. His allies in the Union des Droites pour la République argue that there’s a chance to make this happen, as Le Pen “doesn’t say, as the left does, that funded pensions will impoverish people.”

Even Menton mayor Alexandra Masson, close to Le Pen but sympathetic to Ciotti’s liberal leanings, suggested the RN platform on pensions is still unfinished: “She will flesh out [her roadmap] as the campaign goes on, give her time. There are still points on which the platform can evolve.”

Unfortunately, with Marine Le Pen currently scrambling not only to put together a policy platform that will appeal beyond the far right but also to keep her own coalition together, Ciotti may find himself hard-pressed to make this happen.

🇺🇦Bardella trips over Ukraine position

Jordan Bardella used an appearance at the Ambrosetti Forum on Lake Como, Italy, on Saturday 5 September to try to draw a line under a week of open friction with Marine Le Pen, where he ended up storming out of a meeting after saying Marine Le Pen had to choose between him and her niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen.

He also attempted to stake out his own position on aid to Ukraine, after RN vice-president Louis Aliot called for France to “turn off the tap” on support for Kyiv, which would begin the slow death of the Ukrainian war effort.

Fortunately, Bardella did not go quite that far, but he came close, stating that the RN “support Ukraine and we will continue to support Ukraine, but what I am saying is that the goal driving us must not be to finance the war forever,” he told the forum.

He went on:

“But giving away money we no longer have, because I mean, we have 3.5 trillion euros of debt … I would like us to be able to help everyone, but the extremely serious and worrying state of French public finances means we cannot give money without any guarantee or any certainty that this money will be repaid one day. I mean, the Americans have been much smarter and much sharper than us, as usual, because the money they gave to Ukraine is secured against rare earth extraction.”

Bardella went on to argue that weapons purchases funded by European aid to Ukraine should go to manufacturers on the continent. A familiar RN talking point, building on Emmanuel Macron’s position on EU Strategic Autonomy, but with a different goal: putting up a barrier to arms transfers to Ukraine.

RN MP Laurent Jacobelli echoed the line on Franceinfo the same morning. Support for Ukraine under an RN government would not come “at the cost of France’s financial life … At a time when we are asking the French to make an effort on their pensions, on their healthcare, at a time when France is in a state of near bankruptcy, we cannot endanger our country’s future.”

Bardella did leave himself room. “Defensive military support” would continue, he said, along with humanitarian and training aid.

“If a delivery to Ukraine is compatible with France’s rearmament, we continue. When it puts our own stockpiles and our own defense at risk, obviously not. Our duty as decision-makers and political leaders is to protect France,” he said.

The policy itself deserves scrutiny beyond the budget arithmetic. Conditioning support for a country under active invasion on a guarantee of repayment can be seen as treating an ally’s survival as a commercial transaction rather than a strategic and moral commitment.

The worst part: the schizophrenic position of the Rassemblement National comes at the exact moment Russia is intensifying strikes on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. We also need to bear in mind that French aid committed to Kyiv is a small fraction of the €3.5 trillion debt Bardella invokes, while the RN completely ignores the issue of the pension system.

The affordability argument looks more like a pretext for dsengagement than a genuine fiscal constraint.i

Bardella’s own comparison does not hold up well either. He is right that the American package is not pure charity: it sits inside the reconstruction investment fund created under the minerals deal Washington and Kyiv signed in 2025, which gives the United States a direct stake in future revenue from Ukrainian resource licensing which was heavily criticised as abusive and opportunistic

Plus, let’s be real here: the European support Bardella casts as reckless is not the blank check he implies. The EU’s plan for a large reparations loan, backed by Russia’s frozen central bank assets, has stalled in Brussels purely due to Belgian objections. The 90 billion euro facility EU leaders agreed instead for 2026 and 2027 is explicitly structured so that Ukraine only has to repay it once Russia pays war reparations.

The guarantee Bardella says does not exist is already structured and being implemented, and is intended to make Moscow foot the bill for its crimes against humanity, not to impose a further cost on French or European taxpayers.

There is also real irony in the RN casting itself as guardian of French public money against unsecured foreign lending. The party has spent more than a decade tangled up in its own unresolved debt to Russia: a 9.4 million euro loan taken from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank in 2014, whose collapse two years later saw the debt transferred to Aviazapchast, a Russian aviation parts supplier later sanctioned by the United States over its military clients.

RN says the loan has been repaid. Independent reporting on the arbitration process behind that claim has been considerably less clear. As recently as this year, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government was reportedly working to persuade major French banks to lend Le Pen’s 2027 campaign the money instead, specifically to wean the party off financing from Moscow-linked sources and to head off accusations that the “deep state” was trying to destroy the RN.

Not only that, but the RN was recently involved in a very casual embezzlement scheme at the European Parliament that resulted in €2.9 million in damages.

Bardella closed the day with an attempt at party discipline, telling BFM-TV he retained an “unwavering political and personal affinity” with Le Pen, despite a week that exposed real gaps between them over the ban on the Islamic veil in public and over pensions, where Le Pen has settled on restoring retirement at 62 or even 60 while Bardella had floated a “new system” entirely.

“If some people expect me to be disloyal to Marine Le Pen, that’s to know me very badly,” he said, adding that he intended to “do his job” and stay “at his post.” “Because she has always been my first supporter, I will always be her first supporter.” He said he was not trying to “impose” a line on the party and wanted to get more involved in economic policy, which he called “one of the major issues of this campaign.” “When we have disagreements, we usually discuss them among ourselves.”

The Rassemblement National, a party bankrolled for a decade by Kremlin-linked money and which has engaged in serious embezzlement, is now the one arguing Ukraine cannot be trusted with a loan. Behind the talk of guarantees and debt is a simpler proposition: leave Kyiv to fend for itself, call it fiscal prudence, and let Russia murder our allies for their imperialist dreams.

Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read, you should like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:

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👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

If you enjoy reading articles written by high-level experts, then make sure to support the publication by liking, subscribing, and sharing it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a paid subscription.

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This week

• 🇮🇸Iceland reject EU Accession continuation

• 🚓Sébastien Delogu arrested for police altercation

• 🇸🇪France chases fighter collaboration with Sweden

• 💳Fitch keeps France’s credit rating at A+

• 📉France tiptoes to the edge of recession

🇮🇸Iceland reject EU Accession continuation

So, a quick note before we get into the first Dispatch back from the summer (hi, by the way):

It appears that Icelanders have voted to reject the continuation of EU Accession negotiations, with the numbers as of 11am CET being 47.46% in favour of continuing and 52.52% against.

🚓Sébastien Delogu arrested for police altercation

So, for the first story back from an overly hot, relaxing summer break: this past Monday, far-left deputy for Marseille, Sébastien Delogu (LFI), was arrested after an altercation with police officers in his building.

According to reports, three police officers had attempted to enter his building in search of an individual who was believed to have stolen a watch. Delogu was returning home when they entered, and he refused to let them in after they refused to identify themselves.

Despite this, a few moments later they crossed paths again on the landing of the deputy's apartment, where an argument broke out while the individuals involved were apparently recording each other.

According to the deputy, the police officers insulted him repeatedly, calling him “shit”, saying he ‘stank of shit’, and apparently physically threatening him by pressing his fist into his chest.

On the other hand, the police officers claim that Delogu physically “opposed” them and physically prevented their entry into the building, calling them a “bunch of losers” and calling one an “asshole”.

And in the meantime, the man believed to have stolen a watch was arrested in the apartment opposite Delogu’s and has since been released following a quick judgment.

At the end of all this, Delogu was arrested by the police, held for eight hours on Thursday, and then summoned for contempt following the altercation. The far-left deputy was also criticised for alerting the individual the police were seeking that they were being sought out.

🇸🇪France chases fighter collaboration with Sweden

Moving on to a bigger geopolitical story: Emmanuel Macron will be touching down in Stockholm on Monday for a state visit, where concrete discussions focusing on frigates and a new defence framework agreement will take place.

However, one major line was casually dropped this week by an Elysée official briefing reporters ahead of the trip, a move that could move markets and probably made a certain Bundeskanzler sweat over in Berlin :

France is open to building its next fighter jet with Sweden.

“We’re both looking for aircraft that are fairly similar, fairly small,” the official said, engaging in some political courtship as France attempts to find new partners following the FCAS debacle. When pressed on whether concrete cooperation was on the table, the same official added that France has “aircraft engine production capacity that Sweden doesn’t have,” gesturing at Safran’s know-how and French savoir-faire in fighter tech which Paris can offer.

Now, it’s important to note that nothing has been formally agreed, yet this is the clearest signal yet that Paris sees Stockholm as a live option to replace the failed FCAS project, and not just another friendly Nordic neighbour with a defence industry.

Many of you dear readers of mine will recognise the backdrop of this situation: this is the same fault line I traced when FCAS collapsed this spring.

The Future Combat Air System, the c.€100 billion Franco-German-Spanish project meant to replace the Rafale and Eurofighter by 2040, didn’t die of strategic disagreement so much as it was strangled by an industrial turf war and political gerrymandering in Germany.

Dassault, as the prime contractor on the jet itself, wanted to lead as per the signed agreement. Germany and Airbus, despite their lack of expertise in Fighter jets, wanted primacy and began manoeuvres to take over, and things reached a point where Dassault’s Éric Trappier bluntly stated in March that “Airbus no longer wants to work with Dassault.”

Underneath the corporate squabble sat a real capability gap: Paris wanted a carrier-capable, nuclear-armed aircraft; Berlin saw little use for either feature. A last attempt by Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury to split the difference — two separate aircraft variants — only hardened the divide. Germany pulled the plug in June. The one piece surviving the wreckage is the “combat cloud,” the sensor-and-drone networking layer both sides agreed was worth finishing regardless.

You can read the in-depth breakdown covering every facet of the FCAS history here:

Now many of you may be asking why France is trying to collaborate with Sweden, a country that many don’t view as an important defence actor, but those of you working in the sector know that Sweden checks a box almost nobody else in Europe can: it’s one of only two European countries, alongside France, that can independently design, develop and produce a fighter jet from scratch, as Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonson pointedly noted this summer.

Saab’s Gripen E is a genuine fourth-generation success story, has proven itself a reliable fighter, and, despite its dependence on American technology, is viewed as a strong European product.

And with the push for European strategic autonomy and the need for greater independence in the European military domain, what better partnership could there be than two leading producers of Fighter jets, France and Sweden, collaborating to create a next-generation fighter jet combining French savoir-faire and Safran’s engine technology with Saab’s reliability?

More importantly, Saab has already been running feasibility studies since 2024 on a Gripen successor, backed by a roughly SEK 2.6 billion government contract that runs through 2027, and is due to fly an unmanned demonstrator that year as part of the process.

Stockholm, naturally, is explicitly keeping its options open: does it go alone? Does it join a foreign program like GCAP? Or does it buy an existing platform that would save it a lot of time, effort and money? A decision is expected by September 2027, with many member states attempting to court Sweden to lock in a long-term collaboration with Saab that would effectively secure Europe’s only other sovereign fighter-building capability, next to France.

And Paris isn’t the only one knocking at the door: Germany’s Airbus approached Saab about joining its “Team Gen 6” effort back in June, weeks after FCAS was intentionally killed, and on July 10, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Jonson and German counterpart Boris Pistorius signed a letter of intent covering air defense and next-generation fighter cooperation, with an eye toward unmanned “loyal wingman” systems as well as a crewed jet.

It’s worth being precise about scale here, because the fighter jet talk risks overshadowing the visit’s real, signed deliverables. Monday’s program centres on a signing ceremony for Sweden’s purchase of four French-built frigates, as well as a defence framework agreement between Jonson and French Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin covering “operational matters, defence capabilities and industrial development”.

All of which are part of a bilateral strategic partnership that predates the FCAS collapse and have been a pillar of Emmanuel Macron’s Foreign Policy doctrine of European Strategic Autonomy

The fighter jet comments were a briefing aside, not an agenda item, and the French official was careful to say so: Dassault and Saab remain, in that official’s words, “two competitors with fairly similar approaches who respect one another,” with “cooperation in the past” but nothing formal now.

Expect to hear more about this in the coming weeks.

💳Fitch keeps France’s credit rating at A+

So, moving back to the metropole: Fitch confirmed on Friday that it’s keeping France’s sovereign rating at A+, with a stable outlook. No downgrade, no drama, for now, just good news.

For those of you wondering if this was a surprise: this was more or less the expected outcome. Natixis CIB’s Hadrien Camatte had already called the status quo “the most probable scenario” going into the announcement, while flagging that a shift to a negative outlook “cannot be ruled out.”

Fitch had only reaffirmed the rating in March and had already downgraded it once in September 2025, so cutting it again so soon would have been a genuinely aggressive and damaging move.

Fitch kept its rating steady even as it revised its own deficit forecasts upward: 5.2% of GDP for 2026, 5.5% for 2027, and 5.2% for 2028, up from the 4.9% it modelled back in March. The agency pointed to weaker growth, higher interest costs, and, pointedly, extra defence spending commitments as the reasons for the jump. The ongoing political uncertainty, with presidential elections on the horizon and the potential for a major shift in economic politics, will also play a role in this.

Then there’s the line that will actually sting in Matignon: Fitch flagged “persistent political fragmentation” (‘a hung Parliament, again’ en bon français) as a “major weakness” that “reduces the authorities’ capacity to implement a durable budgetary adjustment.” Put simply, rating agencies don’t love minority governments, and France has had one for over two years running.

Markets had already been pricing in some of this nervousness before Friday’s verdict even landed. French 10-year borrowing costs (the OAT) had been above 4% since late July, a level last seen during the 2009 financial crisis, and the spread over German Bunds had widened to 82 basis points by the day of the announcement, more than double what it was in 2017.

That’s the bond market’s own verdict on “political fragmentation,” and it explains why Fitch’s line about higher interest payments has real teeth: France is now paying a real, growing premium just to keep rolling over its debt.

Economy Minister Roland Lescure (REN) attempted to reassure the country, saying that the government “remains fully mobilised to contain the public deficit and debt, within a responsible and balanced framework.” Whether that survives contact with reality is the real question: Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is reportedly targeting a 2027 deficit of around 4.9% of GDP, effectively burying the previous government’s pledge to get under 3% by 2029, while ruling out tax rises and letting spending climb 2.4%, largely on defence and debt-interest costs.

Debt itself sat at 117.5% of GDP at the end of March, per INSEE, and it’s fast becoming an actual campaign issue rather than a technocratic footnote: Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s proposal to simply cancel a large chunk of the debt, held via the Banque de France, drew fire from across the spectrum, with economists warning it would breach EU treaties, tank investor confidence and edge France toward the exit door on the euro.

And there could be more bad news on the horizon.

Two more verdicts are expected this coming autumn: Moody’s on October 23, and S&P (which already cut France to A+ last autumn) on November 27. If either one moves, it’ll dominate the political discourse and be used as a weapon by the far-right Le Pen and far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the upcoming elections.

If neither does, expect the political class to quietly exhale and go straight back to arguing over the budget anyway, because it is election time, after all

📉France tiptoes to the edge of recession

To wrap up the week: on the same day Fitch was grading France’s homework, INSEE quietly handed the government some bad news: French GDP growth for the second quarter has been revised down to a flat 0.0%, from an initial estimate of 0.2%. Q1 was revised down too, to a 0.2% contraction rather than the 0.1% first reported.

Officially, that’s not technically a recession. The standard definition needs two consecutive quarters of contraction, and flat isn’t technically negative. However, France has gotten here the hard way: a slightly worse quarter between April and June would have tipped the economy over the line and pushed France into the red zone, and over the first half of the year as a whole, growth has come in at just 0.3%.

INSEE pinned the downward revision on a worse-than-expected agricultural season and stickier-than-forecast prices in market services, transport in particular, which only became clear after its first estimate was released.

The details underneath aren’t much prettier: household purchasing power fell 0.6% per consumption unit (worse than the 0.2% drop in Q1), and the savings rate slid from 17.9% to 17.2%, as households spent a bit more (+0.3%) while earning less in real terms.

The read-through for the rest of the year isn’t reassuring either: with inflation running at 2.4% and no single sector actually driving growth, even a modest wobble in Q3 or Q4 would be enough to tip full-year 2026 into outright negative territory rather than just flirting with the technical-recession threshold.

The one genuine bright spot, that 2.9% export rebound, is largely due to a jump in Airbus deliveries, which is a nice reminder that French growth right now leans heavily on aerospace exports, just as defence and fighter-jet diplomacy (hello, Sweden) is dominating the headlines elsewhere in this dispatch.

None of this is good news for Sébastien Lecornu’s government, whose team had already cut its 2026 growth forecast twice this year, from 1% to 0.9% in April, then to 0.7% in July, and even that lower bar now looks generous against a first half that delivered less than half the growth it was pencilling in.

That target now looks nearly unreachable, which undercuts the “responsible and balanced” framing coming out of the Economy Ministry this same week and previews the kind of arguments we can expect as the Presidential election heats up.

And the timing could hardly be worse: this lands the same day Fitch revised its own deficit forecasts upward, citing weaker growth as one of the exact reasons why, and about a month before Lecornu has to present the last budget of the presidential term, one he’s already framing around a 4.9% deficit target for 2027 rather than any serious consolidation.

Expect growth numbers to be the recurring backdrop noise to every budget fight this autumn, right up to the presidential campaign proper. And expect every candidate, from Lecornu’s own camp to Mélenchon on the left and Bardella on the right, to spend the next eight months arguing about whose fault a “quasiment à l’arrêt” economy actually is.

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EU home affairs ministers recently held an emergency video summit on the Ceuta crisis, but by the time they met, nearly all 72,000 people who crossed from Morocco last Thursday had already been sent back. Not one made it to the EU mainland.

And as is usual when there are incredibly ridiculous political situations in the EU, and I sat down yesterday for a Substack Live to unpack what happened and why it matters. Here’s what stood out:

• The obvious question: why, if the evidence is to be believed that Moroccan authorities let 72,000 people cross in the first place, was this point never raised

• The summit looked more like damage control than a real response, papering over a clear lack of EU unity

• Morocco wasn’t mentioned once, reportedly because Spain didn’t want to risk retaliation from Rabat

• On the ground in Spain, Dave found fury at what people see as a total absence of EU solidarity

• In another piece I wrote in The French Dispatch , I broke down the case that this was a hybrid attack by Morocco, and that European governments are choosing to pay Morocco off rather than investigate or retaliate

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Dave and Julien episode if we didn’t touch upon American intransigence: we discussed the leaked US State Department memo suggesting Washington could back rival claims to European overseas territories, including Ceuta and the Falklands, as retaliation for Europe staying out of the Iran War.

Let us know what you thought, read our other articles, and remember to subscribe!

Gulf Stream Blues

Ceuta exposes Europe's chronic lack of unity

Thursday was a dark day for the European Union, and not for the reasons that Europe’s far right and their backers in Washington would have you believe. 60,000 migrants invaded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, located on the African coast and surrounded by Morocco, in the largest single-surge border violation in EU history. That was followed by the largest …

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a month ago · 18 likes · Dave Keating

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I had the great pleasure to head to Prague this week to take part in the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum, and had the chance to catch up with a friend of the Dispatch, from , for a live video recorded on the sidelines.

As you’ll hear in this video, Thursday set the tone for the whole event.

A session featuring former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former US Defence Secretary Mark Esper addressed Europe’s new security reality, which is the polite way of saying: what happens when you can no longer assume Washington has your back.

Both men agreed the dependency had gone on too long. Rasmussen pushed for a formalised Coalition of the Willing within NATO; Esper preferred expanding the existing Joint Expeditionary Force rather than risk further fracturing the alliance.

They found common ground on Ukraine’s NATO membership, arguing for the German 1955 model, with Article 5 applying only to government-controlled territory. Rasmussen went further, making the case that Europe had thrown away its best leverage during the Iran conflict by immediately declaring it wasn’t its war.

What was harder to watch was the broader conference atmosphere around US-EU relations. The official discourse from established politicians was notably managed: resilient partnership, shared values, transatlantic cooperation intact. However, the audience did not seem persuaded, and it appeared that there was a gap between what the podium says and what the people in the seats actually believe, and Prague made that visible.

Later that afternoon, I was on stage with French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad, ECFR director Mark Leonard, and others for a panel on whether Europe’s institutions are actually built for the moment they keep claiming to be rising to. That conversation was rather less diplomatic. Haddad made the case for optimism, but tied it to delivery on the single market and the upcoming Multi-annual Financial Framework.

Others on the panel were less patient: the argument that Europe has spent years being passive where it needed to act and hyperactive where it needed to restrain itself landed with some force.

The question of whether Brussels can reform fast enough to matter before the moment passes did not receive a comfortable answer.

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The Parquet national financier confirmed that a formal judicial investigation will be opened against Édouard Philippe, his deputy, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, and the metropole’s director general, Claire-Sophie Tasias. The opening order was signed on 7 May, according to Le Monde’s reporting from yesterday.

An investigating magistrate, a juge d’instruction, now takes over a preliminary inquiry that has been running since 2023, with searches already carried out at the hôtel de ville and the metropolitan offices in April 2024.

The charges are familiar to anyone who has followed the file: misappropriation of public funds, favouritism, illegal taking of interest, concussion (the unlawful collection of sums by a public official), and moral harassment. Philippe’s office told AFP the candidate “takes note” of the procedure and will answer the magistrate’s questions “as he always has, with serenity.” His lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny, declined to comment.

The Cité numérique file

The case turns on a multi-year service agreement signed on 30 July 2020. The communauté urbaine, then chaired by Philippe, contracted with the association LH French Tech for €2.154 million. The association was chaired pro bono by de Bazelaire, who also held an elected position as deputy mayor for digital affairs.

The arrangement: a public official negotiating a €2.154 million public subsidy with an association run by another elected member of her own majority. LH French Tech, created in July 2020, was the only candidate to respond to the call for expressions of interest that the metropole itself had launched four months earlier.

The whistleblower, who has used the pseudonym Judith throughout the file, was hired as deputy director general in September 2020, and by the time she started raising internal notes about LH French Tech in late 2021, €1.15 million had already been transferred.

The agreement was cut short in March 2022, the lease at the Cité numérique was terminated three months later, and the association was placed in liquidation in 2023. Her fixed-term contract was not renewed, and she filed a civil-party complaint in June 2025, which eventually led to the case being referred to an investigating magistrate.

She has since obtained whistleblower status from the Défenseur des droits, granted on 21 January 2025 after a two-year adversarial enquiry. The metropole is contesting that decision before the tribunal administratif de Paris, which her counsel describes as a textbook strategic lawsuit designed to silence her (procédure-bâillon, or SLAPP).

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We may finally be seeing the next step in the federalisation of the European Union.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have spent the last few weeks locked in negotiations behind closed doors. The conclusions are about to land in Berlin, where German finance minister Lars Klingbeil is expected to read them out, marking the latest bid by Europe’s six largest economies to deliver what twenty-seven have failed to in over a decade: a real market for European capital.

The grouping calls itself the E6, and was launched in late January by Klingbeil and his French counterpart Roland Lescure. Its four declared priorities are the Savings and Investments Union, the international role of the euro (and the digital euro), joint defence procurement, and secure supply of critical raw materials.

The Diagnosis

European households are sitting on roughly €11 trillion in cash deposits, the largest pool of idle wealth in the developed world. The money earns close to nothing and finances close to nothing. Across the wider continent, private savings stand at €33 trillion. Every year, around €300 billion of European capital walks out of the door, the bulk of it heading to Wall Street. The US stock market accounts for around 54% of global market capitalisation. Large European markets sit at 15.7%.

The intellectual case has already been made. Twice. In April 2024, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta published Much more than a market, a report commissioned by the Council. He diagnosed the problem in detail: twenty-seven national markets, twenty-seven sets of insolvency rules, twenty-seven tax regimes, and a population that quite reasonably parks its money in the bank rather than navigate that maze.

Five months later, Mario Draghi delivered The Future of European Competitiveness. He estimated that Europe needs an additional €750-€800 billion in annual investment to keep pace with the United States and China. Without it, he wrote, the bloc faces an “existential challenge”.

The Dark Trading Fight

The opening fight is technical and revealing. France and Spain have drafted a joint position paper, seen by POLITICO, targeting so-called ‘systematic internalisers’. These are the in-house trading platforms run by investment banks, most of them sitting in the City of London, on which firms like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs handle European equity trades without showing the prices to the wider market. Paris and Madrid want sunlight. London’s banks have grown comfortable.

The Real Argument

The smaller capitals are nervous, and not without reason. Ireland and Portugal have warned that the E6 risks steamrolling the twenty-one other governments. Luxembourg, whose financial sector was built on regulatory arbitrage, has gone further. Its finance minister, Gilles Roth, has argued publicly that turning ESMA into a centralised supervisor would not help the EU reach its stated objectives. Those concerns are real. They are also parochial.

A continent that wants to negotiate with Washington and Beijing on equal terms cannot continue to run fifty-two separate financial supervisors. The numbers do not allow it. The geopolitics do not allow it. The Commission’s own proposal for an expanded ESMA, with an independent Executive Board overseeing the largest cross-border firms, has the European Central Bank’s full backing.

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