FT writes that "The ECB will sit on the sidelines during France's debt sell-off"

The ECB has a long-standing doctrinal line between spreads it considers an unwarranted, disorderly fragmentation of monetary policy transmission and spread widening it reads as a fair repricing of fiscal fundamentals; its backstops were designed for the former and conditioned on exactly the sort of fiscal compliance a politically driven French widening would struggle to satisfy. In past episodes of idiosyncratic spread stress in a single large member, the initial posture has consistently been rhetorical calm and deliberate inaction, with any activation of standing tools coming only after dysfunction showed up in market plumbing rather than merely in the level of the spread. The relevant gauge is therefore the OAT-Bund differential and its pace of widening, alongside signs of stress in repo and in the ownership base of French paper, since a domestically driven reprice has historically been left to run while evidence of contagion to other sovereigns is what has shifted the Governing Council. The follow-ons to watch are whether Council members repeat or contradict the sidelined framing, whether the fiscal and political path in Paris produces the conditionality any eventual support would require, and where the spread sits relative to the zones at which the ECB has previously felt compelled to speak. As secondhand framing from the press rather than an on-record decision, the signal is indicative but not binding.