On Monday 6 January, French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced his intention to convene a meeting of his European counterparts in Paris to draw up, “as early as March”, “a strategy” to enable the European Union to respond to geopolitical, security and economic challenges.
“Why should Europe be the breeding ground for talent going to work in California, the savings bank for foreign stock exchanges, when we are the continent with the most savings and China’s end market? It’s a strategic choice. The voice of France is to do the opposite”, he declared at the French ambassadors’ conference.
Faced with Europe’s loss of competitiveness, the French President advocated a “resynchronisation” of the European regulatory agenda. While he shared the objectives of the legislation recently adopted at EU level, he pointed out that it was cumbersome and called for it to be “suspended until we have regained our ability to compete” internationally. Similarly, “a massive regulatory pause” is needed, and the EU should not hesitate to roll back regulations “that hamper our ability to innovate”.
Mr Macron did not cite a specific piece of legislation, unlike the outgoing German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who referred to the directives governing the sustainability (CSRD) and due diligence (CSDDD) of European companies, as well as the regulation on the European taxonomy (see EUROPE 13551/7).
According to Emmanuel Macron, another way of boosting the competitiveness of European businesses is to strengthen the Internal market by removing the barriers that fragment the digital, telecommunications and energy sectors.
In terms of international trade, the French President felt it was necessary to “rethink trade” by ensuring “fair trade”, without which, in his view, “there is no possibility of producing competitively on European soil”. Europe has entered into this dynamic by imposing customs barriers on new electric vehicles imported from China, but “we must go further and defend European content in our production”, he added, and “defend, in every part of the major value chains, the ability to produce in Europe”.
Mr Macron reiterated France’s opposition to the signing of the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur (see EUROPE 13540/1) in late 2024. This agreement does not include “safeguard clauses, if certain markets are destabilised”, nor “real mirror clauses”, he said.
MFF. Finally, the Head of State called for a post-2027 EU budget in line with the European strategy to be drawn up. “We need to pre-empt the budget discussion now: more own resources, the ability to invest over the long term and to borrow on the markets”, he said. He concluded: “We need to almost double the budget, as we did during the Covid-19 period. The challenge is not the same in nature, but it is at least on the same scale”.
See Mr Macron’s speech (in French): https://aeur.eu/f/exz (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion and Léa Marchal)