In Limoges, Michel Barnier presents the government's emergency plan to protect French industry

Michelin, ArcelorMittal, Vencorex, Valeo… not a week without new layoffs in French industry. Traveling on Friday, November 29, to the equipment manufacturer Texelis near Limoges (Haute-Vienne), Prime Minister Michel Barnier tried to respond to the crisis by presenting the government plan “to reindustrialize France”.

The executive specifically targets the three industries of automobiles, steel and chemicals, by proposing measures to other European Union (EU) countries in order to face foreign competition, particularly Chinese.

To help the chemistry sector, Paris wants to have the “strategic character” of fifteen molecules “essential to value chains” European industrial companies in order to protect them, based on the model of the plan on critical metals voted by the EU in May. For the steel industry, the Union must increase, according to France, its customs taxes against Chinese steel and revise its import quotas decided in 2018.

Supporting businesses in difficulty

As for the automobile, in addition to an emergency fund of 250 million euros to help the sector in France, the government is still pleading with Brussels to remove the fines planned for 2025 for manufacturers who will not have reduced their carbon emissions by 15%. Michel Barnier, who may leave Matignon in the coming weeks in the event of a vote of censure against his finance bill for 2025, includes the French proposals to the EU in a calendar of “100 days”.

At the national level, the Prime Minister confirmed on Friday the creation of a « task force » interministerial committee supposed to support companies in difficulty, and the release of 1.55 billion euros to finance the decarbonization of the fifty industrial sites that emit the most greenhouse gases.

Do “more and better in terms of simplification”

Michel Barnier above all wants to relaunch the installation of industrial projects in the region, while the positive results since 2020 in terms of job and factory creation are threatened by the record increase in failures since the start of the year. In order to further accelerate and simplify industrial installations in the country, the head of government therefore announced “exempt” all industrial projects of the system “zero net artificialization” (ZAN) alone, “for a period of five years”.

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