PARIS — Emmanuel Macron called for a “Buy European Act” on Wednesday to protect carmakers on the Continent in the face of competition from China and in response to the United States’ own controversial scheme to incentivize domestic production.
Speaking on TV channel France 2, the French president criticized the European Union as being “too open” on the topic of state subsidies for electric cars as it seeks to accelerate its transition to greener energy sources.
“We need a Buy European Act like the Americans, we need to reserve [our subsidies] for our European manufacturers,” Macron said. “You have China that is protecting its industry, the U.S. that is protecting its industry and Europe that is an open house.”
France has been leading the charge against Washington’s recent Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax incentives for U.S. consumers to “Buy American” when it comes to choosing an electric car. The European Union, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia have all complained at the World Trade Organization that this measure violates international trade rules by unfairly discriminating against foreign manufacturers.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire also recently slammed the U.S. scheme as “jeopardizing the level playing field” and raising the risk of a “new trade war.”
Macron said in the TV interview he had discussed an EU response to U.S. trade barriers during a lunch with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Elysée Palace earlier on Wednesday. However, it was unclear whether the two leaders share the same view on exactly what steps to take.
“[Scholz and I] have a real convergence to move forward on the topic, we had a very good conversation,” Macron said.
Relations between the French president and his German counterpart have been fraught amid disagreements over energy, defense and the economy. But discontent over the U.S. legislation appears to be an area where they converge, given both their countries host major carmakers like Renault and Mercedes-Benz.
According to an adviser to the French presidency, the two leaders agreed to push the European Commission to prepare a response to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.
Giorgio Leali contributed reporting.
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BERLIN/PARIS — Relations are now so icy between Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, the leaders of the EU’s two economic powerhouses, that they are even struggling to agree on whether to be seen together in front of the press.
As the French president and German chancellor prepared for a tête-à-tête in Paris on Wednesday, Berlin announced that they would make a joint appearance in front of the cameras, which is normally the driest of routine diplomatic courtesies after bilateral meetings.
But on Tuesday evening, a statement from the French Elysée Palace contradicted the German announcement, saying there was no press conference planned.
If confirmed, it would be quite a snub for Scholz, who’s traveling with an entire press corps to Paris, and from there continuing to Athens for another state visit. Denying a press conference to a visiting leader is a political tactic that’s generally applied to deliver a rebuke, as was recently done by Scholz when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán visited Berlin.
“Presumably, there has so far been a lack of contact and exchange between the respective new government teams of Scholz and Macron,” said Sandra Weeser from Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party, who sits on the board of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly. “So, we are certainly also at the beginning of new interpersonal political relations, for which trust must first be built.”
The tussle over a media show is just the latest episode of a deepening row between the EU’s two biggest powers.
In recent weeks, Scholz and Macron have clashed over how to tackle the energy crisis, how to overcome Europe’s impotence on defense and the best approach to dealing with China.
Last week, those tensions spilled into public when a planned Franco-German Cabinet meeting in the French town of Fontainebleau was postponed to January amid major differences on the text of a joint declaration, as well as conflicting holiday plans of some German ministers. Disagreement between the two governments was also broadly visible at last week’s EU summit in Brussels.
As Scholz and Macron meet in Paris on Wednesday for a “working lunch,” which has been hastily set up as a downgraded replacement for the scrapped Cabinet meeting, politicians and officials across Europe will be closely watching to see whether the bloc’s two heavyweights can find a way back to much-needed unity. The war in Ukraine and the inflation and energy crisis have strained European alliances, just when they are most needed.
French officials complain that Berlin isn’t sufficiently treating them as a close partner. For example, the French claim they weren’t briefed in advance of Germany’s domestic €200 billion energy price relief package — and they have made sure their counterparts in Berlin are aware of their frustration.
“In my talks with French parliamentarians, it has become clear that people in Paris want more and closer coordination with Germany,” said Chantal Kopf, a lawmaker from the Greens, one of the three parties in Germany’s ruling coalition, and a board member of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly.
“So far, this cooperation has always worked well in times of crisis — think, for example, of the recovery fund during the coronavirus crisis — and now the French also rightly want the responses to the current energy crisis, or how to deal with China, to be closely coordinated,” Kopf said.
Late last month, Paris felt snubbed by Berlin when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz found no time to speak to French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne | Jens Schlueter/AFP via Getty Images
A similar conclusion is being drawn by Weeser from the FDP, another coalition partner in the Berlin government. “Paris is irritated by Germany’s go-it-alone on the gas price brake and the lack of support for joint European defense technology projects,” she said. At the same time, she accused the French government of having until recently dragged its feet on a new pipeline connection between the Iberian peninsula and Northern Europe.
Unprecedented tensions
Most recently, the French government was irritated by the news that Scholz plans to visit Beijing next week to meet Xi Jinping in what would be the first visit by a foreign leader since the Chinese president got a norm-breaking third term. Germany and China also plan their own show when it comes to planned government consultations in January.
The thinking at the Elysée is that it would have been better if Macron and Scholz had visited China together — and preferably a bit later rather than straight after China’s Communist Party congress where Xi secured another mandate. According to one French official, a visit shortly after the congress would “legitimize” Xi’s third term and be “too politically costly.”
Germany and France’s uncoordinated approach to China contrasts with Xi’s last visit to Europe in 2019 when he was welcomed by Macron, who had also invited former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to Paris to show European unity.
Macron has refrained from directly criticizing a controversial Hamburg port deal with Chinese company Cosco, which Scholz is pushing ahead of his Beijing trip. But the French president last week questioned the wisdom of letting China invest in “essential infrastructure” and warned that Europe had been “naive” toward Chinese purchases in the past “because we thought Europe was an open supermarket.”
Jean-Louis Thiériot, vice president of the defense committee in the French National Assembly, said Germany was increasingly focusing on defense in Eastern Europe at the expense of joint German-French projects. For example, Berlin inked a deal with 13 NATO members, many of them on the Northern and Eastern European flank, to jointly acquire an air and missile defense shield — much to the annoyance of France.
“The situation is unprecedented,” Thiériot said. “Tensions are now getting worse and quickly. In the last couple of months, Germany decided to end work on the [Franco-German] Tiger helicopter, dropped joint navy patrols … And the signature of the air defense shield is a deathblow [to the defense relationship],” he said.
Germany’s massive investment through a €100 billion military upgrade fund, as well as Scholz’s commitment to the NATO goal of putting 2 percent of GDP toward defense spending, will likely raise the annual defense budget to above €80 billion and means Berlin will be on course to outgun France’s €44 billion defense budget.
Sick note
Last week’s suspension of the joint Franco-German Cabinet meeting wasn’t by far the first clash between Berlin and Paris when it comes to high-level meetings.
Back in August, the question was whether Scholz and Macron would meet in Ludwigsburg on September 9 for the 60th anniversary of a famous speech by former French President Charles de Gaulle in the palatial southwestern German town. But despite the highly symbolic nature of that ceremony, the leaders’ meeting never happened — with officials presenting conflicting accounts of why that was the case, from appointment conflicts to alleged disagreements over who should shoulder the costs.
French President Emmanuel Macron has refrained from directly criticizing a controversial Hamburg port deal with Chinese company Cosco | Pool photo by Aurelien Morissard/AFP via Getty Images
Late last month, Paris felt snubbed by Berlin when Scholz found no time to speak to French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne: A meeting between both leaders in Berlin had been canceled because the chancellor had tested positive for coronavirus. But several French officials told POLITICO that a subsequently arranged videoconference was also canceled, allegedly because the Germans told Borne’s office that Scholz felt too sick.
Paris was even more surprised — and annoyed — when Scholz then appeared the same day via video at a press conference, in which he didn’t seem to be quite so sick, but instead confidently announced his €200 billion energy relief package. The French say they weren’t even briefed beforehand. A German spokesperson could not be reached for a comment on the incident.
Yannick Bury, a lawmaker from Germany’s center-right opposition who focuses on Franco-German relations, said Scholz must use his visit to Paris to start rebuilding ties with Macron. “It’s important that France receives a clear signal that Germany has a great interest in a close and trusting exchange,” Bury said. “Trust has been broken.”
PARIS — U.S. President Joe Biden needs to watch out; France is resuming its traditional role as Europe’s troublemaker on the transatlantic trade front.
It had seemed like the bad blood between Brussels and Washington was easing on Biden’s watch. Facing a common foe in China, the EU and the U.S. last year struck a truce on the tariffs that former President Donald Trump slapped on European steel and aluminium. Over this year, Russia’s war against Ukraine has meant that America and Europe needed to present a united front, at least politically.
Cracks are now starting to re-emerge, however. The EU is furious that the U.S. is pouring subsidies into the homegrown electric car industry. Accusing Washington of protectionism, Europe is now threatening to draw up its own defenses.
Unsurprisingly, French President Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge. “The Americans are buying American and pursuing a very aggressive strategy of state aid. The Chinese are closing their market. We cannot be the only area, the most virtuous in terms of climate, which considers that there is no European preference,” Macron told French daily Les Echos.
Upping the ante, he called on Brussels to support consumers and companies that buy electric cars produced in the EU, instead of ones from outside the bloc.
There are good reasons why the Europeans are fretting about their trade balances.
The war has delivered a huge terms-of-trade shock, with spiraling energy costs hauling the EU into a yawning bloc-wide trade deficit of €65 billion in August, from only €7 billion a year earlier. In one manifestation of those strains, Europe’s growing reliance on American liquefied natural gas to substitute for lost Russian supplies has re-ignited tensions.
Macron’s comments are a reflection of EU consternation over Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes U.S. consumers to “Buy American” when purchasinga greener car. The EU argues that requiring that car needs to be assembled in North America and contain a battery with a certain percentage of local content discriminate against the EU and other trade partners.
The European Commission hopes to convince Washington to find a diplomatic compromise for European carmakers and their suppliers. If not, that leaves the EU no choice but to challenge Washington at the World Trade Organization, EU officials and diplomats told POLITICO — even if a new transatlantic trade war is the last thing both sides want to spend their time and money on.
Macron’s comments “are clearly a response against the Inflation Reduction Act,” noted Elvire Fabry, a trade policy expert at the Institut Jacques Delors in Paris. “Macron plays the role of the bad cop, compared to the European Commission, which left Washington some political room to make adjustments,” she noted.
‘American domination’
The Commission hopes to find a diplomatic compromise with the U.S. for European carmakers and their suppliers | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
France has traditionally been the bloc’s most outspoken country when it came to confronting Washington on a wide range of trade files. Paris, for instance, played a key role in killing a transatlantic trade agreement between the EU and U.S. (the so-called “TTIP”). Its digital tax angered U.S. Big Tech and triggered a trade war with the Trump administration.
More recently, during its rotating Council of the EU presidency, Paris focused on trade defense measures, which will give Brussels the power to retaliate against unilateral trade measures, including from the U.S.
New tensions are bad news for the upcoming meeting of the Trade and Tech Council early December, which so far has had trouble to show that it’s more than a glorified talking shop.
France won’t be left alone in a possible trade war on electric cars. According to Fabry, these tensions will bring Paris and Berlin closer, as the German car industry is also particularly affected by the U.S. measures.
But the “Buy American” approach is not the only bone of contention. The fact that Europe is increasingly relying on gas imports from the U.S. brought European discontent to the next level.
Although gas import prices fell in September from their all-time highs in August, they were still more than 2.5 times higher than they were a year ago. And, taking into account increased purchase volumes, France’s bill for imports of LNG multiplied more than tenfold in August, year on year, by one estimate.
Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire last week warned that Russia’s war against Ukraine should not result in “American economic domination and a weakening of Europe.” Le Maire criticized the U.S. for selling LNG to Europe “at four times the price at which it sells it to its own companies,” and called on Brussels to take action for a “more balanced economic relationship” between the two continents.
That very same concern is shared by some Commission officials, POLITICO has learned, but also among French industrialists.
It is “hardly contestable” that the U.S. had some economic benefits from the war in Ukraine and suffered less than Europe from its economic consequences, said Bernard Spitz, head of international and European affairs at France’s business lobby Medef.
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PARIS (AP) — Thousands of protesters, including France’s newly crowned Nobel literature laureate, piled into the streets of Paris on Sunday, in a show of anger against the bite of rising prices and cranking up pressure on the government of President Emmanuel Macron.
The march for wage increases and other demands was organized by left-wing opponents of Macron and lit the fuse on what promises to be an uncomfortable week for his centrist government.
Transport strikes called for Tuesday threaten to dovetail with wage strikes that have already hobbled fuel refineries and depots, sparking chronic gasoline shortages that are fraying nerves among millions of workers and other motorists dependent on their vehicles, with giant lines forming at gas stations.
Macron’s government is also on the defensive in parliament, where it lost its majority in legislative elections in June. That is making it much harder for his centrist alliance to implement his domestic agenda against strengthened opponents, and parliamentary discussion of the government’s budget plan for next year is proving particularly difficult.
In a firebrand speech to the Paris march, far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon charged that Macron is “fried” and that his leadership is plunging France into “chaos.”
He predicted that Macron’s ministers would have to ram the budget through parliament’s lower house without giving lawmakers a vote — a controversial prospect that provoked loud boos from the crowd.
Organizers claimed that more than 140,000 protesters marched. Paris police said they didn’t have an immediate estimate for the size of the dense flag-waving crowd that filled squares and streets. There were a few outbreaks of vandalism on the margins, with garbage bins set on fire and bank machines smashed. Riot police kept order.
Demonstrating at Mélenchon’s side was French author Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for literature this year. Mélenchon — twice beaten by Macron in presidential elections — declared the protest “an immense success.”
Organizers called it a “march against the high cost of living and climate inaction.” As well as calling for massive investment against the climate crisis, they also demanded emergency measures against high prices, including freezes in the costs of energy, essential goods and rents, and for greater taxation of windfall profits.
Lawmaker Christophe Bex of the left-wing party France Insoumise — or France Unbowed — called the march “a demonstration of strength” to show “that another world is finally possible if we are all together and all united.”
Another marcher, retired railway worker Eric Doire, said: “What we want is for everyone to live decently with the purchasing power they had before.”
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John Leicester in Le Pecq and Masha Macpherson in Paris contributed to this report.
BERLIN — Officials in Europe and the U.S. praised the awarding of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to activists standing up for human rights and democracy in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine while authorities in Belarus scorned the move.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year has pushed Moscow’s relationship with its Western neighbors to a new low. Even before that, ties had been fraught over President Vladimir Putin’s backing for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, his support for authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Syrian leader Bashar Assad, and his repression of political opponents, such as dissident Alexei Navalny at home.
“I hope the Russian authorities read the justification for the peace prize and take it to heart,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said after the Nobel Committee awarded the 2022 prize to imprisoned Belarus rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which is focusing on documenting war crimes.
“It sends a signal that keeping civil society down is protecting one’s own power. It is seen from the outside and it is criticized,” he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron was among the world leaders who quickly hailed the laureates, tweeting that their prize ”pays homage to unwavering defenders of human rights in Europe.”
“Artisans of peace, they know they can count on France’s support,” the French leader said.
U.S. President Joe Biden said the winners “remind us that, even in dark days of war, in the face of intimidation and oppression, the common human desire for rights and dignity cannot be extinguished.”
“The brave souls who do this work have pursued the truth and documented for the world the political repression of their fellow citizens — speaking out, standing up, and staying the course while being threatened by those who seek their silence,” Biden said in a statement.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg congratulated the winners, tweeting that “the right to speak truth to power is fundamental to free and open societies.”
Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said the award needs to be seen against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.
“There is war in Europe. Your work for peace and human rights is therefore more important than ever before,” he said to the winners. “Thank you for that.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the three groups “fully deserved” the awards.
“The bravery, passion and clarity with which (they) are fighting for freedom and justice deserves the highest respect,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union leaders in Prague.
In Paris, exiled Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told The Associated Press that the award was “recognition of all the people who are sacrificing their freedom and lives for the sake of (Belarus).”
Over the last two years, the government of Belarus has waged a violent crackdown on journalists and protesters who say that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, beating thousands, detaining tens of thousands and charging rights defenders with cases that the opposition calls politically motivated. Many have fled the country for their own safety.
“Physically, you know, this prize will not influence their situation but I am sure it (will) influence the moods and intentions of other countries to help those people who are behind bars,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and writer who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, called Bialiatski “a legendary figure.”
“What Viasna, founded by him, has done and is doing in the current circumstances, is in his spirit, in his philosophy,” Alexievich told reporters Friday.
She added that Bialiatski is “seriously ill” and needs medical treatment, but is “unlikely to be freed from behind bars.”
Belarus’ Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, denounced the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize to Bialiatski as “politicized.”
Ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz said “in recent years, a number of important decisions — and we’re talking about the peace prize — of the Nobel committee have been so politicized, that, I’m sorry, Alfred Nobel got tired of turning in his grave.”
Olav Njølstad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, dismissed the criticism.
“I’m quite sure we understand Alfred Nobel’s will and intentions better than the dictatorship in Minsk,” he said.
Meanwhile, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also took issue with the award, saying the Nobel Committee “has an interesting understanding of (the) word ‘peace’ if representatives of two countries that attacked a third one receive (the prize) together.”
“Neither Russian nor Belarusian organizations were able to organize resistance to the war,” Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted. “This year’s Nobel is ‘awesome.'”
But Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian lawyer who heads the Center for Civil Liberties, said the award was for the groups, not the countries they were based in. In an interview with German weekly Der Spiegel, she said her co-laureates had spoken out clearly against Russia’s hostility toward Ukraine since 2014.
“They always called things by their name,” she said. “That’s why Ales Bialiatski is in prison now and Memorial is banned.”
“It’s not about the countries, but about the people who are jointly standing up to evil,” she said.
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SAINT-NAZAIRE, France (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday called for a “massive acceleration” of renewable energy development in his country, including offshore wind farms and solar power, via a new plan that seeks to bring lagging France closer to the energy policies of its European neighbors.
The move comes amid a major energy crisis in Europe aggravated by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Macron wants France to gain more independence in terms of electricity production.
“The war changed everything… it disrupted the European model, because many countries were depending on Russian gas for (energy) production. And clearly, for the first time, energy has become a weapon of war, ” Macron stressed in his speech in Saint-Nazaire, a port in western France.
Macron went on a boat Thursday morning to visit France’s first offshore wind farm off its Atlantic coast.
He then detailed a range of measures to accelerate renewable energy projects. A bill will be presented next week at a Cabinet meeting.
“We need a massive acceleration,” Macron said. “I want us to go at least twice as fast for renewable energy projects. … “our neighbors often managed to do more, better and, above all, faster.”
Macron’s new strategy comes as a long-term response to the energy crisis, but it won’t help in dealing with shorter-term challenges. France and other European countries fear electricity shortages this winter as Russia has choked off the supplies of cheap natural gas that the continent depended on for years to run factories, generate electricity and heat homes.
France’s energy strategy has long relied on developing nuclear power — based on imported uranium— which provides about 67% of French electricity, more than any other country.
Macron announced at the beginning of the year plans to build six new nuclear reactors and to extend the life of its existing nuclear plants as part of the country’s strategy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
But relieving France’s dependence on global gas and oil also involves boosting renewable energy, he said.
France had previously set a goal to increase its renewable energy sources to 23% by 2020 — but only managed to reach 19%. That leaves the country in 17th position in the European Union, below the average of 22% in the bloc of 27 countries, according to latest statistics.
Despite France’s thousands of kilometers (miles) of coastline, only the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm, with its 80 turbines, has emerged so far. Macron set the goal to build about 50 similar wind farms by 2050 in France.
He also hopes to multiply by 10 the amount of solar energy that is produced, and to double the power from land-based wind farms in the same period.
New measures will aim at reducing the delays in building and launching offshore wind farms from 10-12 years now to about six years, and big solar farms from 6 years to 3 years, Macron said.
The new bill will also aim at providing connections to the grid as soon as a new facility is ready — instead of a delay of up to three years now.
Other planned measures include building solar farms on vacant land along highways, railways and in car parks.
Solar parks will also be encouraged on agricultural lands under certain conditions — including keeping them small to preserve fields for the food industry.
The bill will need to guarantee money for local communities to see local benefits from the energy shift, Macron said.
Macron added he hopes to take the “same approach” for nuclear energy, accelerating and simplifying procedures to build new reactors more quickly.
At the moment, about half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors, all operated by EDF, are shut down for usual maintenance and, in some cases, to repair corrosion problems. The government said this month that EDF committed to restart all of them by this winter.
The French government has warned that a worst-case scenario could lead to rolling power cuts in French homes, and officials have presented an “energy sobriety” plan targeting a 10% reduction in energy use by 2024.
