Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist firebrand running for France’s 2027 presidential election, wants to make €600 billion in public debt disappear. Not pay it off. Not restructure it. Cancel it outright.
The target: bonds held by the Bank of France on behalf of the Eurosystem, accumulated during years of European Central Bank quantitative easing. Mélenchon argues those securities represent roughly 18% of France’s total public debt and that erasing them would free up fiscal space without hurting private creditors.
The numbers behind the panic
France’s public debt hit €3.536 trillion at the end of Q1 2026, equivalent to 117.5% of GDP. That’s an increase of €75.6 billion from the previous quarter alone.
For context, France’s debt-to-GDP ratio sat at about 20% in 1980 and around 60% at the turn of the millennium.
