Will le Pen and Bardella make economic reforms and try to solve the french debt?

 

Will le Pen and Bardella make economic reforms and try to solve the french debt?

 

As of late 2025, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the National Rally (RN) have proposed a shift toward "pragmatic" economic reforms while facing significant skepticism regarding their ability to solve France's debt crisis. Their platform increasingly emphasizes pro-business measures and selective spending cuts, though critics argue their plans could still worsen the deficit.

 

Proposed Economic Reforms

Jordan Bardella has begun laying out a "five-year plan" designed to stimulate growth and reassure business elites. Key pillars include:

Pro-Business Measures: Reducing production taxes, simplifying regulations, and lowering payroll charges for employers to increase competitiveness.

Protectionist Policies: Le Pen continues to advocate for protecting strategic French assets and encouraging industrial "re-offshorisation".

Tax Adjustments: Restoring the wealth tax (previously replaced by Macron's "mansion tax") and rebalancing the tax burden toward profits, speculation, and fraud.

Labor and Pensions: Bardella has hinted at a "grand bargain" that involves deregulating the labor market while potentially safeguarding certain pension benefits, though the party has previously pushed to lower the retirement age.

 

Approach to National Debt and Deficit

France's public debt reached approximately 117% of GDP in 2025, with the deficit projected at 5.5%. The RN’s strategy to address this includes:

Specific Spending Cuts:

Capping France’s national payment to the EU budget to save approximately €3 billion annually.

Cutting an estimated €18 billion from welfare and healthcare spending for migrants.

Reducing spending on renewable energy by roughly €8 billion.

Seeking €60 billion in "efficiency savings" within the state bureaucracy.

ECB Intervention: In late 2025, Bardella suggested that the European Central Bank (ECB) should relaunch quantitative easing (QE) to help manage France's public finance challenges, warning that "if the French economy cracks, the whole euro zone will crack".

Economic Skepticism: Many analysts and institutions, such as Allianz and Capital Economics, remain skeptical, projecting that the RN’s total spending pledges could actually push the annual deficit higher (potentially up to 6.4% of GDP by 2026) due to the high cost of their social promises.

Political Context (2025)

Following a period of severe political instability and the collapse of previous centrist governments, France entered 2026 under a stopgap budget as the National Assembly remained deeply divided. While Le Pen and Bardella have moderated some views to appear "government-ready," their platform remains in direct tension with European Union fiscal rules and existing French reform agendas.