“The desire for risk must impose itself everywhere” in Europe, in particular to respond to the economic shock promised by Donald Trump, estimates Sunday in an interview with JDD The director general of Bpifrance, Nicolas Dufourcq.
“Every four years, American political staff are trying to impress us with male vociferations […]explains to us that Europe is an old lady who has understood nothing in the modern world, ”notes Mr. Dufourcq. “It is absurd”, according to him, because “Europe has considerable assets”.
But, he nuances, it is true that at 27, “our coordination costs are too high” and that the Europeans “are older than the Americans”.
«[Et] Their desire to invest in risk is much stronger than ours, ”he underlines. The Bpifrance leader judges that “the desire for risk must impose itself everywhere: insurers must be allowed to invest massively in technology […] and that the large families of European entrepreneurs invest themselves in the deeptech».
He recommends “giving their chance without giving in to self -reading defeatism” to French companies specializing in artificial intelligence like Mistral AI, Poolside, Hugging Face, H, Dataiku or Dust.
Despite the 1.11 million business creations in 2024 in France, a record, Mr. Dufourcq observes that political instability “reduces the desire to undertake” in the country. He reports a clear drop in the wish to invest in 2025: “The volume of will decreases,” he said.
-Asked about the closings of industrial sites, more numerous than the openings in 2024 in France for the first time since 2016, he notices that there are also “a lot of expansions of factories by SMEs, ETIs or foreign groups” . “We will go up the slope,” he predicts.
BPIFRANCE thus plans to “put 35 billion euros in industry over the next four years”.
Mr. Dufourcq describes as “excellent news” the fact that the taxes of SMEs do not go up in the budget in preparation. According to him, “French SMEs are as much as possible their possible contribution” and are “heroic”.
However, he considers “probable” that retirees have to contribute to the collective effort “at one time or another” and “inevitable, in the long term”, that the parameters of retirement are indexed to the increase in hope of life.
As for the seven hours of free work per year suggested by the Minister of Solidarity Catherine Vautrin, he says he is “favorable to everything that allows the French to be accomplished more intensely through work”.
