How are 'bankrupt' France's borrowing costs still lower than ours?

Neither the UK nor France can boast of having healthy public finances (Photo by WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Locked in a protracted political crisis over the extent of its indebtedness – and with its deficit running at over five per cent of GDP – France has earned itself the unwanted monikers of ‘the sick man of Europe’ and the ‘new Greece’. Despite these woes, its borrowing costs remain lower than the UK’s. Ali Lyon explores why.

If – as James Baldwin famously observed – the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose, then the dying days of Francois Bayrou’s premiership could have spelt the end of France as we know it.

Over August and early September, the then-prime minister knew that France’s parliamentary arithmetic left his government facing an impossible ta