French Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced a new austerity package that will reduce spending by €65 billion over the next five years as France fights to keep its aaa rating. “We wish to protect the French against the grave problems facing other European countries,” said Fillon. “Bankruptcy is not an abstract word.”

France must make these sacrifices to “avoid the day where policies are imposed upon us by others.”

This comes less than three months after France’s last announced austerity measures.

Under the new measures, France will increase its retirement age from 60 to 62, increase the sales tax on books, public transport, restaurant meals and other items, reduce health-care spending, and temporarily increase corporation tax.

France’s struggles to maintain its aaa rating prove an important point. Some commentators talk about Europe being led by a Franco-German axis. But that is not true. France does not have the resources to bail out impoverished nations. It could need a bailout itself soon. As several articles have pointed out recently, he who pays the piper calls the tune. France is not the one paying, and so isn’t calling the shots.

Last month, the Financial Times wrote that “the notion of co-equal Franco-German leadership in the debt crisis is a polite fiction.”

“As the European debt crisis has deepened, so France has found it more difficult to maintain the illusion that it is Germany’s equal and that any solution will be designed as much by Paris as by Berlin,” it wrote. “One telling sign is the mounting pressure on France’s triple-A credit rating.”

German newspaper Die Zeit reports that other nations see German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the leader of Europe. It writes: “Romano Prodi said that, in Europe, she is the ‘lady’ who makes the decisions, ‘and then the French president gives a press conference to explain them.’”

“It is Germany,” writes Die Zeit, “that is playing the de facto leading role in Europe.”

Ultimately, Germany is responsible for toppling Greece’s democratically-elected government. Italy could be next. France is not leading the way out of the crisis. It’s struggling to avoid being part of the problem.