France's unions are striking to copy Spain. They skipped the half of the recipe that worked

Today France does what France does best. Regional trains slow down around Paris, air traffic controllers, hospital staff and postal workers walk out, and the education ministry expects almost one in five nursery and primary teachers to stay home. The big unions have called a national strike, and the students who have been marching for almost two months, along with what remains of the gilets jaunes, are invited to join. The CGT's leader, Sophie Binet, has a word for it: "convergence".

She also has something French unions rarely bother with: a foreign role model.

"There has to be a change of policy," Binet told France 2, as quoted (in German) by ARD's Tagesschau, away from supply-side economics "that costs us a fortune". France needs to raise wages to revive spending at home. "Spain did that, and there the economy is growing while the debt is falling."

Spain. Not Venezuela, not the 1981 Mitterrand programme. Spain. It is a good choice. It is also the most dangerous one she could have made, because Spain's numbers are public, and they do not say what she thinks they say.

The half she is right about

Start with what the right should admit. Spain raised its minimum wage hard. In 2018 it was €735.90 a month, paid fourteen times a year. By 2025 it was €1,184, an increase of about 61%. Plenty of economists warned that would cost jobs. Instead, according to Eurostat, Spain's economy grew 2.6% last year while France managed 0.8%.

So yes: a higher wage floor did not sink Spain. Anyone on the centre-right who still treats every minimum wage rise as the end of capitalism should look at Madrid and update.

That is where the CGT's reading stops. It is where the interesting part starts.

The half she skipped

Eurostat, the EU's own statistics office, published the 2025 public finance figures two weeks ago. They read like a reply to Binet.

France's state spent 57.3% of the country's entire economic output last year, the second-highest share in the EU, just behind Finland. Spain's spent 45.3%. That is twelve points of GDP. Spain's deficit was 2.4%, inside the EU's 3% limit. France's was 5.1%. Spain's debt has fallen from 119% of GDP in 2020 to 100.5%. France's has gone the other way, from 109.5% in 2023 to 115.7%, and the Guardian puts it close to 120% now.

In other words, Spain lifted its wage floor while its state stayed far smaller than France's and its deficit came down. The wage went up; the debt ratio fell because the economy grew faster than the borrowing. France has the bigger state and the slower economy, and wants to fix the second by protecting the first.

And the reform that made Spain's labour market work better was not won on the street. The 2021 labour reform, which pushed employers away from endless temporary contracts, was signed by a left-wing government, the employers' federations and the two big unions together. Spain's unions made a deal with the bosses. France's are marching on the budget.

Now read what the four French rail unions are actually striking against. The government's cuts, they say, would "worsen poverty, slash social security, freeze state workers' salaries and dry up investment". It is a list of reasons to keep the French state exactly the size it is. That is not the Spanish recipe. That is the French one, the one that produced 0.8%.

Spain is not a paradise either

To be fair to the strikers, Spain is no utopia. Its unemployment rate was still 10.5% last year, against 7.7% in France and 6% across the EU. And in 2025 Spain's minimum wage, spread over twelve months, came to roughly €1,380. The French SMIC was already about €1,800 gross. Before adjusting for prices, the CGT wants to add 10% to a floor that is around 30% higher than the Spanish one it holds up as a model.

None of that makes Binet's comparison useless. It makes it half a comparison. Spain shows you can lift the bottom of the pay scale if the economy around it is growing and the state is not eating the extra. France is trying to lift the bottom while the state already takes the biggest bite in Europe bar one.

Let them march, in the centre

There is one point on which the unions deserve support from the right, and the right should say so loudly.

Since the violence of 17 October, marches in many places have been allowed only on the edge of town. Binet singled out Rennes, Toulouse and Lyon. In Paris the police barred the unions' planned route from Bastille to Concorde, close to parliament and the Élysée, and late on Wednesday an administrative court upheld the change, citing an "extremely tense social situation". Some 70,000 police and gendarmes will be on duty. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, warns that some want to make things spiral out of control and promises a very firm response if they do. But he also called today's union-led protest a "rather classic scenario".

Exactly. A union march from the Bastille is the most classic scene in French politics. Smashed shop windows are a crime and should be punished as one. A trade union walking through the middle of its own capital is not. "The principle of a demonstration is its visibility," said Marylise Léon of the moderate CFDT. A government that cannot tell the difference is not defending order. It is confessing that it has lost the argument.

Brussels has the numbers. It just doesn't use them

Which brings us to the other institution that should be embarrassed today. France has been under the EU's excessive deficit procedure since 2024. Its deficit is still well above the 3% line. The rulebook, the letters, the "recommendations": none of it has changed the trajectory. Brussels is quick to lecture smaller countries about their budgets. With Paris it too often sends a reminder and waits.

The case against France's spending model has now been made most clearly not by the Commission, but by a union leader who pointed at Spain and by Eurostat's tables, which show what Spain actually did.

Marine Le Pen is polling strongly for next spring's presidential election. Whoever wins will inherit this argument. Binet has, perhaps by accident, given France a useful starting point. So take her at her word. Copy Spain. Copy the wage floor, and copy the labour deal signed with employers, and copy a state that lives inside 3%. All of it, not just the half that fits on a banner.