Emmanuel Macron announced the forthcoming implementation of “oversimplified procedures” to “halve the deadlines” for a new industrial establishment in France, in an interview posted online Wednesday by the weekly Challenges. The Head of State, who is due to unveil his strategy on Thursday to “accelerate” the “reindustrialization” of the country, intends to do this “to reinvest more in turnkey sites, to strengthen the use of industrial wastelands, in order also to reconcile industrialization and non-artificialization” of soils.
“An agenda for simplifying and accelerating our procedures”
“The priority of large investors, whether it’s data centers, car factories or large battery factories, Americans, Asians or Europeans, is speed. You can offer them billions in aid, if you take two years to investigate a procedure and it’s cubic meters of paper, failure is guaranteed,” he said. “I call for an agenda to simplify and speed up our procedures, by mobilizing all the actors involved in these decisions,” he added. “The key is simplicity and speed”, “especially against China and the United States”.
President Macron opens, with this interview and Thursday’s meeting at the Elysee Palace, a long economic sequence which is part of his attempt to relaunch his five-year term after the pension reform crisis. And for this he emphasizes the reindustrialization of the country, described as “the mother of battles” – after having tackled pensions, long presented in Macronie as “the mother of all reforms”.
A “coherent” economic policy over the past six years
“Reindustrializing means creating purchasing power, financing our social model, building a future for our children, attracting innovation and talent from all sectors, reducing the foreign trade deficit. And then, of course, stop the dropout of this France of the territories”, he pleaded in the Challenges. “If we don’t win the battle for industrialization, we won’t be able to win the battle for full employment, restore prospects and projects to the territories and therefore cement our national unity again,” he insisted.
Emmanuel Macron boasts at length about the results of his economic policy for the past six years, which he considers “coherent” after “decades” of “inconsistency” and “cowardice”. “Over the past six years, we have created 1.7 million jobs, with more than 300 net factory creations since 2017,” he said. If this “dynamic” is maintained, “by the end of the five-year period we will have caught up with the shock of deindustrialization due to the 2008 crisis by recreating as many factories and jobs”.
A new battery factory in Dunkirk
The Head of State affirms in passing that France was in 2022 “for the fourth consecutive year” the “first country in Europe in number of foreign investment decisions”. On Thursday, he must specify his strategy and in particular the main lines of the “green industry” bill which will be presented to the Council of Ministers on Tuesday. It aims to decline the aid supposed to make it possible to compete in the face of the ambitious industrial policy of the United States.
He will then go to Dunkirk, in the North, for announcements on a new factory location for electric vehicle batteries. And on Monday, he will host the sixth edition of the “Choose France” summit in Versailles to attract foreign investment.
Macron advocates a “double shock” to respond to the housing crisis
In addition, Emmanuel Macron calls for a “double shock”, including a “simplification and reduction of deadlines” for construction, to respond to the housing crisis in France. “In my eyes, we need a double shock. First, a simplification and a reduction in the time to produce new housing,” he said in an interview with the weekly Challenges posted online Wednesday evening.