Fitch turns France's outlook negative as a third weekend of protests opens under 70,000 police

France woke up on Saturday to a credit warning and a police operation, and the two belong in the same story. On Friday, in an unscheduled review, Fitch Ratings kept France's sovereign rating at A+ but moved the outlook from stable to negative. The agency pointed to weaker growth, higher borrowing costs and a wider deficit since its August review, and to a political landscape too fractured to deliver sustained cuts. Fitch now expects French government debt to reach about 124 percent of gross domestic product by 2028, up from 115.7 percent in 2025, and it raised the fiscal adjustment France needs just to stabilise the debt to about 3.5 percent of output. The policy debate before April's presidential election, Fitch said, has not materially strengthened its confidence that any durable deficit reduction is coming. Days earlier Moody's spared France a downgrade and kept its Aa3 rating, also with a negative outlook. French ten year borrowing costs hit their highest since 2002 last week, above 5.14 percent.

Saturday is the third straight weekend of nationwide protests over living costs, public services and the state of the schools, and this one falls on Halloween. The government has put 70,000 police officers and gendarmes on the street, matching last weekend, with specialist units, drones, helicopters, 26 armoured vehicles and 15 water cannon. Nunez has promised an extremely firm response to any trouble and called the day very high risk. Police have kept the Paris march off the city centre and set a single route along the outer boulevards from Porte de Bagnolet to Porte de Charenton. Demonstrations are banned from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. in the Republique and Chatelet les Halles districts, where looters ran through shops on October 17, unaccompanied minors are under a 9 p.m. curfew around the Champs Elysees, and officers are alert to rioters using Halloween masks to hide their faces. The United States embassy has told travellers to avoid demonstration areas. More than 1,000 municipal workers are on standby in Paris to clean up behind whatever happens.

The movement began in late September as President Emmanuel Macron's minority government opened talks on the 2027 budget. Students angry at crowded classes, decaying school buildings and an admissions system they call unfair have been joined by trade unions and by Yellow Vest activists from the movement that shook France in 2018 and 2019. The first Saturday, October 17, caught the security forces off guard. Shops and public buildings were damaged across the country, Limoges city hall burned, and the Chamber of Commerce puts retailer losses above 1 billion euros, about 1.1 billion dollars, as of October 31. The government is pushing a law that would make rioters liable for up to 10,000 euros of damage caused by themselves or by a group they are judged to belong to.

The politics around the money and the politics around the street now feed each other. The unrest has lifted Marine Le Pen, who leads the opinion polls for April's presidential election, while the centrists who might succeed Macron remain split among themselves. A government that cannot pass a budget without a fight is being told by a ratings agency that its debt path is getting harder to reverse, on the same weekend it has to hold the streets of its own capital with 70,000 officers. The protests have also spread. Youth led demonstrations on the same grievances are planned in more than 30 German cities on Saturday.