María del Carmen Abascal, the disabled 87-year-old who became the face of Spain’s housing affordability crisis after being evicted and carted away on a stretcher last month, isn’t doing well. Specifically, she’s dead.

Abascal, known in the protest movement as “Maricarmen,” passed away on Wednesday. The cause of death wasn’t immediately disclosed, but it seems as likely as not she was just tired. Following her eviction, she was hospitalized for exhaustion. Her condition subsequently deteriorated.

As she lay dying, the property management company which booted her from the apartment where she resided for some seven decades agreed to reverse, entirely, the rent increase that forced her from the flat, but… well, as her family put it, the “solution came too late.”

I bring this up for the second time this week because what Maricarmen’s attorneys aptly described as “an absolutely avoidable situation” ultimately prompted Spanish premier Pedro Sánchez to call a snap vote. The political tumult in Spain is insult to injury for Europe and, more to the point, for besieged European bonds at a time when France is in thrall to an escalating crisis.

Although flat on the day as of this writing, France’s 10-year yields came within a few basis points of 5% on Thursday. They were — checks notes — negative 0.45% this time seven years ago.

Have a look at that chart. Suffice to say the world’s a different place than it was in 2019.

“Negative interest rate[s] and asset purchases were a staple of developed-market central bank policy for a decade, mak[ing] it easy for sovereigns to sell their debt at low yields,” JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke remarked, with barely-veiled disdain. “Unsurprisingly, such policies led to profligate spending [and] nations are finding that investors have become more discerning buyers of their debt.”

The situation in France is acute. Protests against poor conditions at public schools continued on Thursday, when at least 150 high schools were closed around the country. That was at least fewer than Tuesday, when as many as 900 schools were shut due to the demonstrations.

Long story short, France’s fiscal situation is apparently so dire that the government can’t afford to keep classrooms adequately staffed, nor school facilities respectably maintained. The French far-left’s sympathetic to the students’ cause, but fanning the figurative flames carries significant risks in the event more groups join the protests and things start to burn, literally.

It scarcely matters. Jean-Luc Mélenchon can’t win. But Marine Le Pen sure can and probably will. Indeed, I think it’s a virtually certainty that, on her fourth try, Le Pen ascends the Élysée, an outcome the country’s political center has moved mountains to avert over the years.

All populists — those on the right and left — are inclined to magical thinking when it comes to public finances. Le Pen’s no different. Earlier this week she said France is spiraling towards “a de facto default.” She blamed the political establishment and said her plan, which includes tax cuts, pension reform, limits on France’s payouts to Brussels (which, if not approved at the EU level, would presumably mean cuts to subsidies for key French constituencies) and an effort to squeeze multinational corporate tax cheats, will fix the situation.

Spoiler alert: It won’t. Or at least not anytime soon, and certainly not within the — chuckles — 18-month timeframe Le Pen laid out for reassuring markets that France is “a reliable partner.” She says she can cut the deficit by nearly 2.5ppt in just four years and slash France’s debt-to-GDP ratio by 7ppt to a still high 112% over the same period, while simultaneously cutting taxes by €30 billion. I think we all know how that’s likely to turn out. The bond market certainly does.

Coming back to the broader point, the developed world’s experiencing a comeuppance for the ages. “Concerns are not limited to one single nation. Whether it is France, the US, Japan or the UK, there has been a persistent theme of worry that government deficit spending will eventually lead to a reckoning for sovereign debt markets,” BMO’s US rates team said this week. “The run-up in real rates throughout this year is certainly consistent with these risks, with the strain in the French market only the latest episode that reinforces fiscal worries.”

The figure above illustrates the point perhaps better than any other: It shows you Bloomberg’s negative-yielding debt series, which used to be in the news seemingly every other day.

Once upon a time, which is to say “way back” six years ago, negative-yielding sovereign debt was just par (no bond market pun intended) for the course in the developed world. Indeed, negative-yielding corporate debt was a thing in 2019, particularly in Europe. Now, there’s virtually no such debt, if there’s any at all.

“It is remarkable to think that at the end of 2020 there was nearly $20 trillion of negative-yielding debt globally,” JonesTrading’s O’Rourke went on, in the same note mentioned above. “Now the world’s safest instruments act as if they have no bid most days.”