France's Hottest May on Record Triggers Heat Emergency

The heat was the day's defining emergency. Meteo France confirmed Monday as the hottest May day since records began, with new monthly highs at 352 weather stations and a peak of 37.1C near Hossegor in the south-west. Scientists put the odds of such heat in May at roughly one in 1,000 and blamed a "highly anomalous and powerful" heat dome made more likely by human-caused warming. The agency, which had issued its first-ever May heatwave alert over the weekend, forecast 35C in Nantes and 34C in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Bordeaux on Tuesday, with even Lille reaching 30C. Several deaths have been linked to the heat, including a 53-year-old runner who died on Sunday during a race in Paris.

The episode revived France's long-running debate over heat readiness. Since its 2023 "Paris at 50C" exercise the capital has planted more than 100,000 trees and stripped out over 6,000 parking spaces and 1.3 hectares of asphalt to green its streets, and at April's Santa Marta summit the government set a roadmap to end coal by 2030, oil by 2045 and gas for energy by 2050. A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analysis of the 2025 summer attributed about 1,444 French heat deaths to climate change. "The countries that will fare best are not the ones with the most money," forecaster Ionna Vergini told Euronews Earth, "they are the ones that treat heat as a public health emergency rather than a weather story."

In the courts, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered the release of former Lafarge chief executive Bruno Lafont and deputy managing director Christian Herrault, jailed in April for six and five years respectively over nearly EUR5.6 million paid to armed jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, to keep a cement plant running in Syria. The court placed both men under judicial supervision pending their appeal, ruling that detention was not necessary to secure their attendance and citing the "shock of imprisonment."

France also pushed back on Moscow's pressure over Ukraine. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pascal Confavreux called Russia's renewed demand that foreign nationals and diplomats leave Kyiv "a new intimidation from Moscow" and said it was "out of the question" to evacuate French staff, while adding that Paris was taking the threats "very seriously" and increasing vigilance. The rebuff put France alongside Germany, the EU and other governments that summoned Russian envoys the same day.

The day's economic news sharpened the pressure on the government's finances. In its annual review the IMF urged France to accelerate fiscal consolidation, warning that current efforts would not bring the deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2030, and projecting growth of just 0.7 percent in 2026 amid the wars in Ukraine and Iran. The Fund recommended politically toxic measures -- extending working lives, raising patient co-payments for healthcare and resuming the pension reform suspended since 2023 -- as France's unemployment rate sits at a five-year high and the government leans on unpopular savings.