Transcription
M is going to be speaking.
Thank you very much L for your words, your majesties, distinguished head of state and governments, President Lagard, ministers, ambassadors, business leaders, ladies and gentlemen. I'm I'm extremely happy to be here and um it's it's great to be here as a financial times would say and [snorts] um and uh and it's a time of peace, stability and and predictability. [snorts] Uh so let's try to address the key challenge of this world in a in in in a few minutes time.
But it's clear that we are we are reaching a time of of unstability of unbalances both from the security and defense point of view and the economic point of view. Look at the situation where we are. I mean a shift towards autocracy against democracy, more violence, more than 60 wars in 2024, an absolute record even if I understood a few of them were fixed. And um and conflict has become normalized. hybrid expanding into new demands, space, digital, information, cyber, trade, and so on. It's as well a shift towards a world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot and where the only law that seems to matter is that of the strongest and imperial ambitions are resurfacing. Obviously, the Russian war, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, which will enter into its fourth year next month, [snorts] and conflicts continue in the Middle East and across Africa. This is as well a shift towards a world without effective collective governance and where multilateralism is weakened by powers that obstruct it or turn away from it and rules are undermined. And I can multiply the examples of international bodies weakened or left by the key economies. And when we look at the situation, it's it's clearly a very concerning time because we are killing the structure where we can fix the situation and the common challenges we have.
Without collective governance, cooperation gives way to relentless competition. competition from the United States of America through trade agreements that undermine our export interests, demand maximum concession concessions, and openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe, combined with an endless accumulation of new tariffs that are fundamentally unacceptable, even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty and competition from China, where massive excess capacities are distorted. practices threaten to overwhelm entire industrial and commercial sectors. Export control has become more dangerous. New tools destabilizing global trade and the international system. And the answer in order to fix this issue is more cooperation and building new approaches. And it's clearly building more economic sovereignty and strategic economy especially for the Europeans which is for me the core answer in this context.
I want to exclude two approaches. The first approach would be to I would say to passively accept the law of the strongest leading to vesselization and block politics. I think accepting a sort of new colonial approach doesn't make sense and all the head of states and government and business leaders which would be too complacent with such an approach will take huge responsibility. The second would be to adopt a purely moral posture limiting ourselves to commander. That path would condemn us to marginalization and powerlessness. Faced with the brutalization of the world, France and Europe must defend an effective multilateralism because it serves our interests and those of all who refuse to submit to the rule of force. And for me the two answers are on one side more sovereignty and more autonomy for the Europeans on the other size and efficient multilateralism to deliver results through cooperation.
Obviously France and Europe are attached to national sovereignty and independence to the United Nations and to its charter. And it's not an old-fashioned way to live multi multilateralism. It's news not to totally forget what we learned from the Second World War and remain committed to cooperation. And this is also because of those principles that we have decided to join the mutual exercise in Greenland without threatening anyone but just supporting an ally and another European country, Denmark. facing this order and this new situation. Um, this year France holds the G7 presidency with a clear ambition to restore the G7 as a forum for frank dialogue among major economies and for collective and cooperative solutions. Trade wars, protectionist escalation, races towards over production will only produce losers. This is why addressing global economic imbalances is our key priority.
And if we look at the situation, the current imbalances are due to some key phenomena. And we all have to deliver our own agenda. This includes American overconump overconumption, Chinese under consumption and overinvestment and European underinvestment and lack of competitiveness. And these imbalances are also reflected in development gaps by the way. And we can no longer settle for aid that neither delivers sufficient result nor enables countries to escape poverty. So our objective through the G7 is to demonstrate that the world's major powers are still capable of reaching a shared diagnosis of the global economy and committing to concrete actions. Cooperating is not blaming is not about blaming others. It is about assuming one's share of responsibility and contributing to solutions. So the objective of this G7 will be to build this framework of cooperation in order to fix the roots of these imbalances and restore efficient convergence and cooperation through multilateral frameworks. And the other objective is as well to build bridges and more cooperations with the emerging countries the bricks and the G20 because the fragmentation of this world would not make sense. Here this point is for I would say the global agenda and howy uh our G7 agenda.
On the other side we have the European answer and for me Europe clearly has to fix its key issues. lack of growth, the lack of GDP per capita growth and um the three pillars of our strategy in order to deliver more sovereignty, more efficiency and more growth would be based on protection, simplification and investment. [snorts] Because the diagnosis is well known, European competitiveness still lacks behind that of the US and in the current global order facing uh precisely the Chinese approach, we have to react.
So first protection protection doesn't mean protectionism but today's Europeans are too naive. This is the unique market open to everybody without checking level playing field. Nobody can access the Chinese market as people are exceeding accessing the European market for sure. But even if you take the US and a lot of other countries, the level of protection does exist for investment and trade and the Europeans are the only one not to protect their own companies and their own markets when the other countries doesn't respect level playing field. This is why we have to be much more realistic if we want to pro protect our chemical industry, our industry from the automotive sectors to a lot of others because they are being literally killed by the lack of respect of a normal framework and and level playing field. Europe has very strong tools now and we have to use them when we are not respected and when the rule of the game are not respected. By the way, the anti-co mechanism is a powerful instrument and we should not hesitate to deploy it in today's tough environment. We must also advance the principle of European preference. There is a North American preference in your market. There is no European preference today. We are progressively creating it and in the latest documents and decisions taken by the decisions we we we do have the first examples of that. But this is extremely good and we are currently aligning closely with Germany to deliver an ambitious and simple framework and this is a decisive project and I count on the European Commission to present a proposal as well by by early 2026 with the highest possible level of ambition in order to deliver I would say across the different sectors the principle of European preference. This is a necessity. We must act on imports as well. Regarding this protection issue and in context of escalating trade tensions and Asian overcapacities, Europe must strengthen its trade defense instruments including mirror measures to enforce regulatory standards. And we must improve the quality and added value of foreign direct investments targeting projects with strong export potential. And this is core for the rebalancing with China. China is welcome but what we need is more Chinese foreign diet investments in Europe in some key sectors to contribute to our growth to transfer some technologies and not just to export towards Europe some devices or produces or products which sometimes don't have the same standards or are more are much more subsidized are the one being produced in Europe. It's not being protectionist. It's just restoring this level playing field and protecting our industry. So from safe safeguard closes to my world closes to European preferences and incentives for more FDIs, this strategy is absolutely key. And in parallel, protecting our economies will also require a resilient strategy on both important exports to derisk supply chains particularly for raw materials, rare earths, semiconductors, chips and to diversify our trade partners.
The second pillar of the European economy and and European strategy should be simplification. And when I speak about simplification, we started with CSRD, CSLD and we have to do much more on different sectors and we did it during the past few weeks on automotive and we have to do it on chemical, digital, AI, banking and so on. And the core of this simplification is sometimes to get rid of some recent regulations when they disynchronize in a certain way the European Union in comparison with the rest of the world. But we have as well to accelerate the deepening of the single market on all these sectors. The 450 millions inhabitants and consumers market should be the domestic market of all the EU companies. It's not yet the case as long as you have complexities. In doing so, we must ensure respect, technological neutrality and nondiscrimination within the European Union. This is another pillar, another point of simplification, neutral approach in terms of technology and nondiscrimination. We discriminate during such a long time between the different source of energies. It's counter it's counterproductive for the Europeans themselves. Companies have a role to play and we must we must act and you must act and clearly you must help identify and concretely help us to simplify where it is needed. But for me this agenda of simplification is not a matter of discussion but just implementation speed and scale. [snorts]
The third pillar of the European strategy for more competitiveness and more autonomy is based on investment and innovation. We have to invest much more. If there is a GDP per capita so different between the US and Europe, 65% to 70% of the explanation is due to the difference in terms of innovation. And the US was much more innovative because of public and private investment. So [snorts] in our budget for the the months to come because we will negotiate during the years this year in Europe we have to invest much more money in the critical sectors where the innovation will be made AI quantity green tech but as defense and security the size of our common budget is not the right one we have to invest much more money in order to be much more credible and accelerate this innovation agenda but at the same time if you look at the situation we don't have sufficient private investment and this is one of the main difference. We do have the savings as the Europeans much more than the US by the way but this saving is overinvested in bonds and sometimes in equities but outside Europe. So this is why the top priority should be securitization program. It is prepared. We have to accelerate the implement the implementation and second capital market union [snorts] precisely in order to have more integration and simplification but to have an efficient capital market uh union in order to invest much more money and use our savings to be invested on innovation and equity in Europe.
This agenda for me is our top priority both the global and the European one and it is to be implemented in the months to come because everything is about acceleration and France is committed to deliver this agenda. We work very closely with our key partner and at the same time our objective for France is to stabilize our results [snorts] and our our macro approach and to remain the highly attractive country we are. We've been uh the most attractive country of Europe during the past six years. And to consolidate our deep structural reforms and our key advantage and on top of the business framework we have I want here to insist on the fact that we have a competitive stable lowcarbon electricity supply. We exported last last year 90 terowatt of electricity and low carbon one based on our nuclear model. We have world-class innovation and research capabilities and we will improve them. And we have one of the most vivid and active ecosystem in AI, quantum computing, energy transition etc etc and a lot of the startups and unicorns and large caps of these sectors are with me in my delegation today. And on top of that, let me insist and I will stop here on the fact that we have a high quality infrastructure and large market with strong purchasing power and we have a place where rule of law and predictability is still the rule of the game. And my guess is that it is largely underpriced by the market and beyond what you can do in terms of investment, what you can do in terms of strong ambitions, having a place like Europe which sometimes is too slow for sure and is to be reformed for sure but which is predictable, loyal and when where you know that the rule of the game is just the rule of law. It's a good place and I think this is a good place for today and for tomorrow.
So we will be committed during 2026 to to try to deliver this global agenda in order to fix global imbalances through more cooperations. And u we will do our best in order to have a stronger Europe, much stronger and more autonomous based on the the the pillars I just mentioned and based as well and we can revert in the dialogue but on more investment and commitments on defense and security because we have to invest much more and invest much more because we do believe and here in the P center of this continent we do believe that we need more growth. We need more stability in this world, but we do prefer respect to bullies. We do prefer science to plotism. And we do prefer rule of law to brutality. You're welcome in Europe. You are more than welcome to France.