France braces for nationwide strike against austerity budget

French lawmakers rejected the first part of the 2027 budget on 4 November, and the country is now braced for a nationwide strike day on Thursday, with unions promising hundreds of thousands of demonstrators against an austerity package meant to rein in a public debt crisis that has alarmed financial markets and drawn pressure from the European Union.

The mobilisation pulls together the strands of six weeks of unrest: the student movement that began in mid-September over overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and university admissions has broadened, with trade unions marching over the cost of living and fuel prices stoked by a global supply shock. Healthcare and education staff, air traffic controllers, rail and dock workers and postal employees are all expected to join. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez is deploying more than 70,000 officers and says intelligence services have identified 'considerable interest' from far-left and violent protest groups aiming to provoke unrest, hold unauthorised marches, or loot businesses.

Authorities have restricted the unions' proposed Paris route and approved an alternative, tightening security after violence on 17–18 October marred largely peaceful demonstrations. Unions and rights groups call the policing excessive and 'authoritarian'.

The arithmetic facing the government is stark. Emmanuel Macron must push the budget through a hung parliament with elections due in April — less than six months away — and Marine Le Pen leading the polls, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed in second. The unions' statement on Thursday accused the budget of 'targeting the most vulnerable and those who are ill, freezing social benefits and undermining the protective role of the social security system'. The government's concession on education — €4 billion in preferential-rate loans for school renovations and 15,000 new university places by 2028 — was dismissed by student unions as 'window dressing'; they had asked for €10 billion in direct investment.

The rejected bill now goes to the Senate, with a vote scheduled for 9 December and a parliamentary committee tasked with brokering a compromise before it returns to the National Assembly. Nobody in the assembly wanted to be recorded voting first for the measures that must pay for decades of deficits — so they sent it to the Senate instead.