How Macron and Merz are sabotaging Europe's reindustrialization

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At the request of employers, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron have been responsible for draft European directives requiring companies operating in the Union to ensure that their suppliers and subcontractors around the world respect fundamental human, social, and environmental rights.

Yet Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron also feature prominently among the leaders who regularly complain about the deindustrialization of Europe and are committed to reversing this trend.

But by sabotaging these draft directives, they are depriving Europeans of one of the main, if not the only, instruments they have at their disposal to combat, even somewhat effectively, the social and environmental dumping that exists outside the Union. Dumping is largely at the root of offshoring and the vast movement of deindustrialization that it has generated in Europe.

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We live in a world where global social and environmental standards remain very limited, and the means to strengthen them are very weak. Now, with Donald Trump's return to the White House, they are practically nonexistent. Unfortunately, there is no longer any chance that global governance will be strengthened in the coming years.

The main way we can try to reestablish a "level playing field" (fair rules of the game), as the Anglo-Saxons say, fair competition with the rest of the world, is to play on the size of our market. It still represents 20% of global consumption, and remains essential for all international players, whether Chinese or American.

We can force all those players, European or not, who want to sell us their products or services to exert pressure, through their supply chains and subcontractors, to increase the level of social and environmental requirements in the rest of the world. And thus gradually bring them closer to ours. When we do this, it works, as we saw in Bangladesh following the collapse of the Rana Plaza in 2013 .

By depriving Europeans of this essential lever, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz are not only penalizing workers and residents of the countries of the South, who will not be able to benefit from this upward pressure on their social and environmental rights, but they are also hampering European producers and sabotaging the continent's reindustrialization.

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