The president of the Court of Auditors, Amélie de Montchalin, considers that France is going through the most decisive moment of truth since the birth of the Fifth Republic. The burden of public debt interest this year reaches a level that exceeds the National Education budget.
Amélie de Montchalin does not mince her words. The president of the Court of Auditors, the institution responsible for overseeing the regularity of public finances, believes that France is facing « probably the most important choice of the Fifth Republic, » a regime established by referendum in 1958 and still in force. It is in an interview with Le Parisien that she issues this warning, calling to stop what she describes as the « drift of the debt interest burden. »
The figures she presents illustrate the scale of the problem. In 2026, the interest service on French public debt alone will reach €80 billion. An amount that exceeds the budget of the Ministry of National Education, set at €65 billion, represents 40% more than that of the Armed Forces and six times the Justice budget. In other words, repaying the State’s creditors now costs more than educating the children of the Republic.
The situation is all the more worrying as the level of public debt surpassed an unprecedented threshold in 2025, exceeding the peak recorded during the 2020 health crisis. According to Amélie de Montchalin, France would be the only European country in this situation, which places the question of national sovereignty at the heart of the debate: a state whose budgetary margins are absorbed by debt repayment mechanically loses its capacity to act.
However, the president of the Court of Auditors refuses to present this trajectory as inevitable. She cites as examples Germany, Italy, and Portugal, which managed about fifteen years ago to stabilize their debt under comparable circumstances. « There is no fatality for France if choices are swift and responsible, » she insists, conditioning any recovery on the speed and coherence of upcoming political decisions.
