Pigs will fly before the EU dares fine Macron’s France

Corrective budgetary measures are expected to be imposed on the miscreants, five of which are members of the euro, towards the end of the year. It’s already shaping up to be quite a bun fight. 

Particularly awkward is France, which even before the last government fell, had no credible plan for the required deficit reduction. Proposals put forward by the current caretaker government are also widely considered to fall well short.

If the Left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance, which won the largest number of seats in recent French elections, manages to form a government, there is even less chance. France has in the past repeatedly broken deficit rules, but has so far faced no sanction. 

Theoretically, nations subject to proceedings could be fined up to 0.05pc of GDP – which in France’s case would amount to around $135bn (£106bn) – but no state has so far suffered this penalty. 

European Central Bank (ECB) threats to cut offending governments out of its bond-buying programmes similarly look entirely hollow. What is the ECB going to do? Sit idly by and watch the single currency ripped apart anew while markets test its resolve to destruction?

Yet it scarcely needs saying that if France, Europe’s second-largest economy, is let off the hook, nobody else is going to comply either.

Once again, the uniquely unstable nature of Europe’s currency union is plain for all to see. Member states refuse to comply with the degree of fiscal restraint that is meant to underpin monetary unity.

Is the German cheque book forever to underwrite the fiscal profligacy of Germany’s eurozone bedfellows?

At some point, Berlin’s patience will break. The euro has already survived a number of near death experiences, so it would be foolish to depict the crisis now looming as the one that finally breaks the camel’s back.

No doubt the single currency’s high command will find some way of glossing things over anew and staggering on regardless. 

Here in Britain we are these days sublimely beyond the reach of Europe’s fiscal thumbscrew. At most, the Council’s procedures are no more than a handy yardstick against which to measure our own fiscal freedoms.

What we choose to make of them is of course another matter entirely. You can only bend the rules so far before they snap.