After his aborted attempt to run for the last presidential election, Arnaud Montebourg continues his fight for French industry by supporting the creation of innovative companies whose genesis he recounts in a series of podcasts. He gives L’Express his feelings on the latest announcements from the government and the Elysée in favor of the industrial reconquest of the country. Hair-raising.
L’Express: The President of the Republic now speaks of reindustrialization as the “mother of battles”. You say, “Hallelujah”?
Arnaud Montebourg : If we finally take the bull by the horns, I will be delighted. But it is very late! Our foreign trade has literally collapsed: in 2022, France’s trade balance is in deficit by 160 billion euros. Never seen ! When I left the government, we were at a deficit of 60 billion euros and we were fighting to avoid the disappearance of businesses every day. Nine years later, it’s 100 billion more deficit. What a waste of time! We are the only country in Europe to dive like this.
The nation is in a state of absolute emergency on the economic ground. Apart from Ile de France, all French regions have fallen in wealth per inhabitant below the European average, showing that we are in the process of impoverishment. Because the liberal policy pursued for ten years has not worked. While we are collapsing, foreign investors come to shop here. And not only in the Bordeaux vineyards, where they are buying up all the châteaux… As the economist Jean-Marc Daniel says, we are now a country held by our creditors. If we continue like this, France will soon belong abroad. We are handcuffing ourselves, and forced to sell ourselves, because we have not worked to reindustrialize the country and quite simply produce what we consume.
What do you think should be done?
To restore our trade balance, we need to relocate at least 50 billion euros per year in turnover – it’s gigantic! – , bring out of the ground between 500 and 1000 factories, and create a million jobs, half in industry, half in services. François Bayrou, the High Commissioner for Planning, published a report at the end of 2021 on the necessary reconquest of our productive apparatus, in the hope of winning the battle for foreign trade. What was he writing? “France has in some respects the characteristics of a developing country economy.”
When I speak of absolute urgency, it is unfortunately not a figment of the imagination. And we are in the midst of an energy crisis: tens of thousands of small businesses, whose electricity bills have been artificially multiplied by five or six, are today on the verge of bankruptcy, in silence and total invisibility. How to reindustrialize with energy at a destructive price that the government is unable to bring back to normal?
There was the tariff shield…
But it does not work ! Entrepreneurs have to beg for help, here or there… It’s a bureaucratic obstacle course. What they want is to return to normal bills. And for that, it is necessary to do like the Spaniards and the Portuguese, to disconnect from the price of the European electricity market. We produce low-cost electricity, which is an extraordinary asset. It’s absurd to have to spend public money to reduce the cost of electricity inflated by the delusional European mechanism. The pro-European doxa is killing us and will end up driving us crazy!
What do you think is stopping the president from doing that? The fear of getting angry with Germany? The desire to maintain European consistency?
No, the government is lying to itself by taking refuge in the denial of statistical averages. We repeat over and over that our rates are “not so bad” while our companies are taken by the throat. In 2014, when Emmanuel Macron succeeded me at Bercy, I passed on to him 34 industrial plans, in the train, automobile, green chemistry, satellites. He quietly abandoned them. Because he stuck to his liberal positions. We had to let things happen, and therefore do nothing!
At the time, Peugeot and Renault were, for example, ready to jointly develop an engine that would consume 2 liters per 100 kilometers by 2020. This was a tremendous step forward in reducing fuel consumption and emissions. polluting, before the transition to all-electric. This project remained in plan, and today, we are still at 5 or 6 liters per 100. So yes, the announcements of the President of the Republic on the importance of reindustrializing the country are very positive, but so late. He defends sovereignty, after having been for so long the staunch defender of laissez-faire. Our manufacturing industry only weighs 9% of GDP, when Spain is at 12%. Straightening it is a work of Titans, which no Jupiter will be able to accomplish without a national mobilization, nor the popular momentum of the whole country.
That’s to say ?
The solution does not rest on foreign investment, nor on the state’s self-fulfilling conviction that everything is going to be better, but on the full mobilization of the nation. Companies, big and small, need to create new businesses in droves. The territories are on the front line to help them but don’t have the money. The banks have to finance them, which they don’t do, they don’t finance the real economy. It is also necessary to mobilize the savings of the French. We have 2,000 billion euros in life insurance, which are our pension funds. If we injected 10% into the productive economy, rather than into Singaporean bonds which produce nothing, it would already be an extraordinary revolution.
Will we be able to reindustrialize without resorting to protectionism, whether in the form of subsidies – à la Joe Biden and his… 400 billion for green industry! – or by customs tariffs on certain strategic sectors?
Protectionism is common sense. How do you want to put French agriculture, family, with fragmented land, in competition with South American agribusiness where the farms are 300,000 hectares, with zero or almost zero ecological standards, and one agricultural engineer for 1,000 hectares? . If we ban GMOs at home, we must also ban the import of GMOs, it’s common sense, once again.
We are caught between two aggressive, predatory and protectionist empires, China and the United States. Emmanuel Macron finally puts a toe in the cold water of protectionism, by laying the beginnings of a principle of reciprocity: he proposed to abolish the bonus for non-European cars. Congratulation ! This should have been done a long time ago. Before globalization, I remind you, there were import quotas on Japanese cars. Let’s restore them to the Chinese! We are free to do so in view of the unfair competition destructive of European industry which is looming.
When asked about protectionism, the government replies that it can only be done on a European scale. And that Franco-French measures would anger the Union…
The European Union will not be happy? Will send ushers? Will send the police? But which ? So what ? We will plead. She’ll fine us? But the European Union is financed by us: we are a net contributor to the Union’s budget to the tune of 45 billion euros per year. We cannot expect others to defend our interests. It is not the Chinese who are going to defend French industry. Nor the Germans. They are the French and them alone.
What role does bureaucracy play in French deindustrialization?
It is considerable. To reindustrialize the country, we need a Deputy Prime Minister who does a lot of housekeeping in the standards, which are produced by the administration, not by politics. An example: the Compagnie des amandes, a company that I manage, plans to set up a factory in the Var, in an industrial area that has been serviced since 1986. La Dreal, the regional directorate for the environment, development and housing, falls on us to ask us for a “4 seasons” study evaluating the impact of this project on the black-tailed newt or the albino crayfish… This modest project – 12 million euros of investment for 7000 m² – of relocation of Spain to France would have stopped if the Prefect had not withdrawn his perfectly useless study in an industrial area!
Biodiversity is obviously a concern, I am the first to defend it, I am still an entrepreneur in the repopulation of bees, with Bleu Blanc Ruche. But there are still no natural compensation sites, which the administration refuses to do because it prefers to grant derogations, thus allowing biodiversity to be destroyed! While blocking economic projects for absurd reasons.
When Emmanuel Macron evokes the idea of a “regulatory break” on environmental standards at European Union level, do you therefore subscribe?
Ecology and sovereignty are part of the same logic. When we import manufactured products at world prices that violate our own social and environmental laws, the first responsibility is to manufacture these products at home, as close as possible to our consumers, while respecting the collective choices that underpin our society. Ecology is the primary reason justifying an industrial relocation policy. Afterwards, the consumer citizen engaged in the ecological transition as I am myself, will have to make a huge effort of coherence.
Do you want medicines made in France? Accept Seveso sites. Do you want electric cars made in France? Agree to reopen the mines that supply the battery components. Do you want to feed yourself with better quality food? Agree to pay them more. Only in this way, by promoting the convergence of views between producers and consumers, will we be able to get our industry back on track and achieve the ecological transition. From my point of view, punitive ecology is the most conservative current of current globalization, since it helps to prevent the relocation of activities on our territory.
