Senior French ministers called for changes to President François Hollande's tax and spending cuts plan over the weekend, saying alternatives are possible and attacking austerity policies in France and the euro zone, reports The Wall Street Journal.
In interviews with the French press and speeches at a Socialist gathering Sunday, Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg and Education Minister Benoît Hamon said forcibly reducing budget deficits as the economy wilts is driving up unemployment, fueling political extremism and risks tipping the economy into recession.
"The priority must be exiting crisis and the dogmatic reduction of deficits should come second," Mr. Montebourg said in an interview with Le Monde published ahead of the annual Fête de la Rose meeting of Socialist Party activists at Frangy-en-Bresse in eastern France.
The minister also turned on Germany: "We need to raise the tone. Germany is caught in the trap of austerity that it is imposing across Europe."
Mr. Hamon joined Mr. Montebourg's call for a change of course. He said the Socialist government needs to reconnect with its electorate and boost demand by increasing tax cuts for households after defeats in local and European elections this year .
"The worst thing would be to think of French people as children who haven't understood," Mr. Hamon said, speaking after Mr. Montebourg at the Socialist meeting.
This isn't the first time the Mr. Montebourg has attacked French government policy. In July, he proposed a string of measures to boost domestic demand and advocated handing more tax cuts to consumers.
But the criticism comes at a difficult moment for the French president, who said earlier this week he will push ahead with a three-year plan to cut public spending to fund tax cuts for business even as the economy stagnates.
Businesses continued cutting investment in the second quarter despite receiving the first payouts from labor-tax reductions. Critics of Mr. Hollande's plans have seized on the economy's disappointing performance in the first half of the year to argue the Socialist leader needs to rethink the balance of cuts.
"Promising to get the economy going again, on the path to growth and full employment, hasn't worked. Honesty obliges us to acknowledge this," Mr. Montebourg said in a speech to supporters. "The role of the economy minister and any statesman in his place is to confront the truth—even it is cruel—and propose alternative solutions," he added
The government must use more of the gains from public-spending cuts to reduce taxes on households, instead of focusing mainly on reducing deficits and bringing down business taxes, Mr. Montebourg and Mr. Hamon said.
"I have asked the president of the Republic for a major inflection of our economic policy," Mr. Montebourg said.
Mr. Hollande already had reacted to his economy minister's comments Saturday, saying Paris is united in its push to focus on growth.
"I want us to be able to convince our European partners to make growth the priority. Anyone is welcome to defend this idea and it is the position of the whole government," Mr. Hollande said in a televised news conference Saturday on the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean.
Read more of this report from The Wall Street Journal.