In less than forty days – until December 31 – the will have to approve the budget for 2026. The relevant debates in the National Assembly continue unsuccessfully.
Concerns about another fall of the government and political paralysis remain. The French prime minister, a centrist, said on Thursday that he “wants to open the debate, in the National Assembly, on five ‘absolute priorities’ – the fiscal deficit, state reform, energy, agriculture, and internal and external security, and then political parties and social partners to ‘position themselves’ on these issues”.
The issue of the roof is absent from Lecorni’s priorities. In France, however, the roof crisis, as in many European countries, including Greece, is more than real.
Seven out of ten French people say that it is now difficult to find housing in their municipality, according to a poll by the Odoxa polling institute (11/18/2025). The French cite as the main cause of their difficulty that housing costs absorb a third of household income: between 1996 and 2023, house prices rose by 88%, while the average wage rose by just 13%.
Speaking to Monde, Valerie Letard, former Minister of Decentralization and Spatial Planning, points out that this is “a technical, complex issue, which requires long-term planning” and adds that “it is necessary to have a political response to , which prevents young people from studying, couples from starting a family, workers from accepting to move to another city for work”.
Housing and Far Right
Apart from these, the Mortgage is an issue that causes intense social discontent and indirectly fuels the vote in the Far Right.
The idea that social housing (HLM -Habitations à Loyer Modéré – Rent Controlled Housing) is being “occupied” by foreign households is a narrative consistently promoted by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party. According to an Odoxa poll (19-20/11/2025), Jordan Bardela, leader of the RN, is firmly in the lead, with 35% in the intention to vote, in the first round of the next presidential elections to be held in April 2027. Emmanuel Kos, president of the Union of Social Housing (USH), is also sounding the alarm, stressing that the issue of housing must be an issue of the next election campaign. “We must not let the National Rally impose its agenda, as it did in the 2022 presidential election.”
The example of the United Kingdom
The French far-right is not original, as in several European countries, far-right parties take advantage of the difficulty of citizens to find housing, and combine this difficulty with immigration. In the Netherlands and the UK, the idea that refugees are depriving locals of housing is widespread. So much so that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s British Labor government recently announced the end of automatic access to housing assistance for asylum seekers as part of its bid to stem the rise of Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform party.
It should be noted that the far-right Reform comes first in the polls with 29%, followed by the ruling Labor Party with 18% (Politico, 18/11/2025)
Social housing and tensions
In France, many believe that social housing is “discriminatory” given to immigrant families, to the detriment of “native” French people. In ten years, applications for social housing have increased by a million and the waiting list is approaching 3 million households. However, Emmanuelle Cos argues that social housing is given based on income, the existence of a disability, or domestic violence.
Due to their low incomes, immigrant families qualify while many studies show that they face discrimination in the private rental market.
Middle class: the fear of degradation
In a study (August 2025), the liberal think tank Institut Montaigne studied the difficulties of the French middle class in acquiring housing and concluded that, in order to strengthen the social contract again, housing policy, one of the fundamental pillars of the Republic, must be redefined.
“A large part of the middle classes is excluded from both social housing and property,” notes Nicolas Len, head of relevant research at the Montaigne Institute, to Monde. “The middle classes are characterized by the fear of social degradation and the desire to rise. Owning a home is considered a shield against social degradation.”
