“At best, we were told we were old-fashioned. At worst, fascists…” When she launched the Made in France Show (MIF) in Paris in 2012, Fabienne Delahaye received a frosty reception in “authorized” circles. Seven years later, the long ordeal of Covid, during which the French discovered, astonished, that they were no longer able to make fabric masks or hand gel, has awakened consciences. And convinced the organizer that she was right. The next edition of MIF Expo, in November, at the Parc des Expositions de la Porte de Versailles, confirms this: 100,000 visitors are expected over four days at the stands of more than 1,000 exhibitors – there were only 70 originally. An ode to the blue, white, red where all the political leaders with pens now flock, from the French Communist Party to the National Rally.
“We must become a land of industrial production again with workers, with engineers, with researchers. We must become a land of agricultural production again, it is a question of sovereignty,” the new Prime Minister recently hammered home, on his Savoyard lands. Consensual subjects being rare these days, Michel Barnier understood the interest in seizing this one on the fly. And since he is thinking about the composition of a “balanced” government, why not appoint a full-fledged Minister of Made in France? Giorgia Meloni did so in November 2022, without finding herself banned from Europe: she appointed Adolfo Urso as Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy.
A Transpartisan Fight
At La Plage aux entrepreneurs, an event dedicated to French know-how held on September 12 in Arcachon, in partnership with L’Express, the idea met with a strong response. Gilles Attaf, the president of Origine France Garantie, former boss of Smuggler suits, would see it as the consecration of the transpartisan fight he has been leading for years, alongside centrist Yves Jégo and socialist Arnaud Montebourg. As he likes to point out, producing locally is good for growth, for social cohesion – we put jobs back in sometimes forgotten territories – and for the planet, thanks to the virtues of short circuits.
Thomas Huriez, for his part, is full of suggestions for the future minister. Create low-rent workshops, based on the model of social housing, to encourage the establishment of production units in the city. Develop industrial tourism. Ban the word “operator” from all French factories and replace it with the exact term for the profession practiced. “With made in France, the customer does not just buy a product, he offers himself a story to tell, an emotion, a pride. If this ministry were to see the light of day, it would need dual supervision: Economy and Culture”, argues the founder of the jeans brand 1083. In his pocket, another proposal: further Frenchify public procurement. A shortcoming highlighted in 2010 by Yves Jégo, then a member of parliament, in a report on “anonymous globalization” submitted to Nicolas Sarkozy, and which “ended up on shelf 34 of reports not followed up”, to the great displeasure of its author.
The matter is nevertheless important, as Olivier Lluansi, industry specialist and author of Reindustrialization: the challenge of a generation, published on September 16 by Les Déviations. “European texts prohibit national preference in public purchases. But German administrations and communities, which respect these texts like us, supply themselves much more in made in Germany than ours in made in France. By being as smart as them, we could generate, per year, 15 billion euros of additional turnover for our companies, or a quarter of our trade deficit. It’s a fantastic lever!”
Where does the problem lie? Germany has only 3,000 public buyers, who are fully aware of the specifications and prices of local products and are therefore able, without violating European rules, to finely steer calls for tender. In France, this task is assigned to 120,000 people, “whose job it is not most of the time, like town hall secretaries, and who are terrified of being caught for the offence of favouritism, deplores the former Minister of the Economy and Industrial Recovery Arnaud Montebourg. We need professional purchasing centres. And less “Brussels-relatedness” on the Bercy side!”
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