A week after the British prime minister, David Cameron, refused to sign a Europe-wide pact leaders hoped would stabilize the euro zone, a cross-Channel spat has escalated into a full-blown war of words as Paris has reached a fever-pitch over the prospect that France is about to lose its triple-A credit rating, the highest available.
President Nicolas Sarkozy had already started preparing the country this week for the imminent loss of its gilt-edged status — an event made more likely after the summit meeting of European Union leaders last week, like so many before it, was widely declared a flop. But in the past two days, French officials have unleashed a diatribe suggesting that Britain, not France, is far more deserving of a downgrade.
“At this point, one would prefer to be French than British in economic terms,” the French finance minister, François Baroin, declared Friday.
The ruckus comes as Mr. Sarkozy is gearing up for a tense re-election campaign heading into what promises to be a gloomy year economically for the country and much of the rest of Europe.
Troubled by the crisis in the euro zone, France is probably already in a recession, the government and the central bank warned this week, with a decline in economic activity expected to continue at least through March. Business and consumer sentiment have deteriorated, and unemployment is stuck just below 10 percent.
Paris has embraced two austerity plans since the summer in a bid to reduce the country’s chronic budget deficit and meet the demands from Berlin to set an example for the rest of Europe to follow. Officials believe those steps are also necessary to prevent France’s international borrowing costs from rising to unhealthy levels as investors worry that France is losing the capacity to foot a growing bill from the euro zone crisis.
The verbal onslaught seemed aimed at deflecting attention from those problems. Within hours, headlines blared from British news Web sites taking exception to the perceived French snub.
“The gall of Gaul!” read The Mail Online. An article in The Guardian accused French politicians of descending “to the level of the school playground.”
To be sure, both countries are in poor economic shape. While the French are not suffering anything like the distress being felt in Greece, Portugal and Ireland — which cannot pay their bills without help from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund — the French government is not immune to speculators who see its rising debt levels as making it vulnerable to attacks in the bond market.
France’s debt as a percentage of gross domestic product was 82.3 percent in 2010, a figure that is expected to rise in the coming years even after it tightens its belt. Britain’s debt to G.D.P. ratio was 75 percent, also rising fast despite a stringent austerity program that is, at least for now, only adding to the country’s economic woes.
In France, the deficit was 7.1 percent of G.D.P. last year. Mr. Sarkozy has pledged to reduce it to 3 percent by 2013, partly through higher taxes, but he has been reluctant to spell out which social programs might have to be cut as well, out of fear of further alienating already disenchanted voters.
A looming recession is making that fiscal dilemma even worse by adding to social costs and reducing tax revenues.
“It is very bad news for people, because it means the unemployment rate will increase as more firms will have to fire people or go bankrupt in the private sector,” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a professor of economics at L’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. “It’s also bad news for politicians: they are in a kind of a trap because they have to say to the people that there is nothing they can do for them.”
As he walked to his job in an affluent suburb of Paris, Steve Kamguea, 22, an entry-level banker at AlterValor Finances, said he saw little hope for a revival of economic growth in France.
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