In Episode 3 of the first season of Succession – appropriately named “Lifeboats” – Kendall Roy stands atop a glass-walled roof as Gerri Kellman delivers the hammer blow: Waystar Royco has $3 billion in debt, secured against its own stock. If the price dips below $130, the whole empire could unravel. Gerri offers her deadpan consolation: “Don’t jump.”
It’s a scene that perfectly captures the panic of discovering that what looked like victory – the chance to steer the ship – actually comes with the ballast of debt that could sink you before you begin.
That, in truth, is how most newly elected governments must feel when they first sit down with their finance ministry. Campaign promises dissolve in the fluorescent glare of the budget spreadsheets. Reality arrives in the form of obligations inherited from decades past, debts piled up by predecessors who are long gone from office, yet whose decisions still bind the hands of those in power today.
François Bayrou’s recent warnings about France’s fiscal position fit that script with uncanny precision. His government, already in chaos, has been forced to confront the brutal mathematics of the national accounts. And unlike the comforting fictions politicians often spin about waste-cutting and “efficiency savings,” Bayrou has been blunt: France’s debt burden is unsustainable, and the state’s finances are teetering.
This is not just a French story. The United Kingdom is staring down an equally grim ledger. Growth has stalled, interest payments on debt are consuming ever-larger chunks of public spending, and the promises of both left and right alike are collapsing under the weight of fiscal reality.
Populists, of course, like to imagine they can bend numbers to their will. Nigel Farage has promised to upend the system, to break with the orthodoxy. But the hard arithmetic of debt will force him – if he ever holds the levers of power – into the same unglamorous role as every finance minister before him: making cuts, raising taxes, and disappointing the voters who believed in the promise of easy answers.
Bayrou’s candour, then, is worth noting. For all his government’s current turmoil, he is at least saying out loud what most politicians only whisper behind closed doors. National debt is no longer a distant macroeconomic concept, the stuff of Treasury reports and bond markets; it is becoming the central political problem of our time. And the truly dangerous thing is that no party, however radical or cautious, can pretend to be immune from it.