Change the story and turn the page on the pension reform. The French President, Emmanuel MacronHe has this goal between his eyebrows. He wants me to stop monopolizing public debate in France his unpopular rise in the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 (with 43 years contributing to receive a full pension). To do this, she has multiplied his communication efforts in recent days to claim the “reindustrialization” green of the neighboring country, despite a balance with chiaroscuro on this very sensitive issue in one of the European States that suffered the greatest de-industrialization in the last 40 years.
After a visit last Friday to the Prologium electric battery factory in Dunkirk (north), the centrist leader held the annual Choose France summit on Monday at the Palace of Versailles. Some 200 entrepreneurs foreigners have attended this meeting aimed at promoting the economic attractiveness of the neighboring country, which is going through a time of strong social and political turmoil. The Fitch rating agency lowered France’s debt grade at the end of April (from AA to AA-), after the massive protests in recent months and the management of the Macronist Executive, criticized somewhat harshly by the influential Anglo-Saxon press .
Meeting with Elon Musk
As he has been doing since 2018, Macron invited the cream of world business under the pomp of Versailles. He met in the morning with Elon Musk, owner of Tesla and Space X and the largest shareholder of Twitter. He also had plans to meet face to face with the head of the pharmaceutical multinational Pfizer or the steel giant ArcelorMittal. Within the framework of this summit, they have announced a total of 28 projects, valued at 13,000 million euros and which will create some 8,000 jobs in the coming years. It represents the highest number of investments announced in Choose France.
With @ElonMusk, we talked about the attractiveness of France and the significant progress in the electric vehicle and energy sectors. We also talked about digital regulation. We have so much to do together. See you this afternoon at the #ChooseFrance Summit! pic.twitter.com/wkdwjv45OG
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) May 15, 2023
This act, however, has an evident communicative dimension. Many of these projects had already been agreed upon in recent months and have now been announced together to give them more packaging. In fact, Macron gives great importance to foreign investment to justify his economic supply policies, such as the tax cuts of more than 50,000 million for companies and public subsidies and aid for private groups of 160,000 million in 2019, according to a study by the University of Lille, published at the end of last year.
According to the centrist leader, the “attractiveness” of his country is due to the perseverance in his reforms neoliberals, criticized by a considerable part of French public opinion and which fuel indignation on the street. “We have made some clear, bold reforms and above all we maintain them despite the crisis of the yellow vests, the war, inflation and the protests. There is total consistency of macroeconomic policies,” Macron defended this Monday in an interview for the liberal journal L’Opinion.
Balance with chiaroscuro in industrial matters
Despite the communicative efforts of the Executive to vindicate its results in the “reindustrialization” of France —this Tuesday it will present a green industry law in the Council of Ministers—, its balance in this matter is by no means exceptional. It is full of chiaroscuro.
According to a recent study by the Key cabinet on economic attractiveness, France was in 2022 —and for the fourth consecutive year— the European country that attracted the largest number of foreign investments. 40% of them were concentrated in industrial projects. Despite this, these investments led to much lower job creation compared to neighboring countries. According to this same study, each of these foreign projects created an average of 33 new jobs, while in Germany there were 58, in the United Kingdom 59 and up to 326 in Spain. In total, the number of jobs created by foreign investment in the neighboring country fell by 15% between 2021 and 2022.
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Since 1974, France has lost up to 2.26 million industrial jobs. The secondary sector barely represents 17.5% of the total French GDP, a percentage lower than the close to 30% in Germany or 20% in Spain. Despite the efforts of the Macron government to change this situation, applying policies similar to those of his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, it is finding it difficult to reverse this trend.
The manufacturing production French is currently 0.3% lower compared to its level in March 2015. The weight of the manufacturing industry with respect to GDP has fallen from 13.74% in the first quarter of 2017 —just before Macron came to power— to the current 12.74%, according to INSEE data. In contrast, the number of full-time employees in the industrial sector did increase by some 94,000 in the last six years. A few green shoots, but rather tiny in size. And that they do not compensate for more than four decades of deindustrialization.