France's premier wants to ax two holidays to boost growth. Non, people say.

Washington Post

16-07-2025

PARIS — The French government proposed cutting two public holidays per year to boost economic growth as part of a budget plan that it billed as a 'moment of truth' to avoid a financial crisis. But in a country where vacations are sacred, the idea — unsurprisingly — prompted outrage across political spectrums, suggesting it may have little chance of becoming law.
The populist National Rally launched a petition against French Prime Minister François Bayrou's plan to eliminate two of the country's 11 national holidays, calling it a 'real provocation' against French workers. The party, which has the largest number of lawmakers in the 577-person National Assembly, vowed to block the budget when it comes up for a vote this fall.
Marine Tondelier, a politician from the Greens party, whose bloc holds 38 seats in the National Assembly, called the suggested holiday cuts a 'red herring' designed to distract the French public from 'all the other concessions' the government proposed on public spending, taxes and public services to help with the country's growing debt and low growth. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left leader whose bloc holds 71 seats, called on all left-wing parties to vote to censure the government over the proposal.
The reaction from the left and right is set to put Bayrou on a 'collision course' with lawmakers when they return to work in the fall, said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group.
Bayrou named Easter Monday, usually in April, and May 8, which commemorates the defeat of Nazi Germany, as options but said he was open to considering others in future negotiations over the budget, including with unions and other workers groups.
He said that the change could add 'several billion' euros to the state budget, 'simply because businesses, shops, the civil service, and the nation will work, and our production will improve.'
Rahman said the budget proposal, as it stands, has little chance of getting through a divided assembly. After snap elections last year produced a hung parliament, President Emmanuel Macron's centrist government does not have enough seats in the National Assembly to pass laws on its own and needs the support of other parties. 'Most of the measures he's put forward are incredibly contentious, and the reaction of both the far right and the hard left to these proposals was very clear,' Rahman said of Bayrou.
Rahman called Bayrou's budget proposal 'a suicide note that will allow him to claim that he told the country and parliamentarians what France needs to do to get its fiscal house in order, in the knowledge that these measures won't go through.'
Bayrou unveiled the sweeping budget proposal at a news conference Tuesday, sketching an outline of various measures he said are designed to halt the 'spiraling public debt' by 2029. The top line: 43.8 billion euros in proposed tax increases and public spending cuts aimed at bringing down the deficit to 4.6 percent of gross domestic product next year — an ambitious goal he said was necessary to avoid a future financial crisis.
'We have become addicted to public spending,' said Bayrou, who was named prime minister in December after several previous governments fell amid a protracted period of political upheaval, and who is staking the political future of his government on this budget.
'This is the last stop before the cliff,' he added.
His other measures involve reducing public spending, including through cuts in government jobs and expenses, and a freeze on all pension and benefit increases in 2026. He also suggested that taxes could effectively increase for wealthier retirees and working households as well as large companies.
But the measure that's drawn the strongest reaction so far is Bayrou's proposal to bring down the number of holidays in an effort to boost productivity. French people are particularly attached to their time off and work-life balance and tend to get ticked off when their government attempts to reduce either. Major protests have broken out in recent years over attempts to increase the retirement age — which Macron's government eventually forced through — and increase the maximum number of working hours per week.
Studies show that public holidays are linked with employee well-being but that they come at a cost — although it is difficult for economists to assess what would have happened if a day had been a holiday or vice versa.
Britain's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport estimated that a one-off holiday created in June 2022 to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 70th year on the throne cost the British economy about 2.4 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in terms of GDP.
Research in 2021 estimated that in countries that do not replace public holidays when they fall on a weekend, an extra day off 'would forgo around 20 percent of the proportional GDP.' Other studies have shown that holidays can have positive impacts on the economy, from boosting retail sales to increasing tourism.
After the Danish government decided to eliminate the Store Bededag religious holiday starting in 2024 and use the money saved to increase defense spending — prompting widespread anger there — a paper published by the International Monetary Fund estimated that the holiday's cancellation would increase labor supply by between 0.14 and 0.34 percent.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has said that the United States has 'too many non-working holidays' and said 'it must change.'
'It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don't want it either! Soon we'll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year,' he wrote on Truth Social on Juneteenth, a day to mark the end of slavery that became a federal holiday in 2021.
France has roughly the same number of public holidays as the United States (11) and Canada (12), but more than its British neighbor across the Channel (8).
Charles Wyplosz, emeritus professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, wrote in an editorial for French newspaper Le Monde that Bayrou's budget proposal is 'courageous and original in some ways,' but warned that it could be 'only fleeting' if its key measures are watered down because of political opposition. 'It shows that it's possible to stabilize the deficit without seriously increasing taxes,' Wyplosz wrote.
Critics of the proposal to cut two holidays said it represents an attack on French history. The National Rally called May 8 'a sacred date in our history,' while conservative politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan accused the Bayrou government of 'erasing us' by cutting Easter Monday, a day 'dedicated to the most important Catholic feast in the calendar.'
May 8 became a public holiday in France in 1953, after the end of World War II. But just a few years later, in 1959, President Charles de Gaulle decreed that the day would remain a commemoration but would no longer be a holiday, in an effort to promote unity between postwar Germany and the rest of Europe. In 1975, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing eliminated even the commemoration aspect of the day for similar reasons. It was reinstated as a public holiday in 1981 under President François Mitterrand.