rather, they seem to be insufficiently taxing their substantive wealth. i mean, this is france. it's a very rich country. the idea that it's drowning in debt it can't pay off is nonsense.
the way the eu is structured is a problem because it neither allows for sovereign debt nor does it allow for wealth redistribution. i've been careful about commenting on the bourgeois narrative around this, because i have a lot of criticism about how the eu operates. the entire media narrative from all directions has no grounding in facts or reality, so it's extremely difficult to find a way into it in terms of finding a position to criticize. france has enough economic capacity that it should be able to run larger deficits without concerning itself about it, but the structure of the eu places artificial restrictions on debt financing government budgets. the winner is private debt holders, many of them located overseas, that get interest payments from french taxpayers as some kind of foreign tribute on what should be sovereign debt. it's unsustainable, but the solution is reforming the eu, not austerity (as macron is enforcing or le pen wants to continue) or "cancelling the debt", as melenchon is running on, but can't actually do.
in the short run, until the eu can be reformed to allow for greater budget deficits and more wealth redistribution, the only remaining solution is localized tax increases (to pay for out of control war spending in africa and generous handouts (or loans) to ukraine, which could be cut to save substantive amounts of money upfront very easily), but the parliament is blocking it. it indicates an intentional desire to redistribute wealth upwards.
there's plenty of money for war, there's plenty of money for "foreign aid", there's plenty of money for interest payments to foreigners and there's plenty of wealth that could be taxed. the narrative that there's no money for schools or pensions is consequently a rather blatantly transparent lie being enforced by the banking class, which the media is faithfully parroting.
that said, i'm not convinced that the schools are underfunded to begin with, but the money to hike spending is there, if they do make that choice. don't believe that france is too poor to pay for it's kids or elderly. that's absurd.