“We must move towards greater international trade”: Medef pleads in favor of the agreement with Mercosur

“We have to give ourselves time because there are what we call “mirror clauses” and we have to check that the four South American countries involved respect the minimum on the environmental and social level,” said expressed Patrick Martin this Thursday morning, on France 2. If the boss of Medef was thus favorable to the free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union, he still called for “remain very cautious » in the face of future commitments from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

However, the business leader assured that around 20% of French employment was “directly and indirectly” linked to exports, and that the door to such an agreement should obviously not be closed. “Are we ready to eliminate 20% of French jobs?”, he asked, explaining that “if we closed the borders to imports, reciprocally, the exporting country will close its own borders”.

“Let’s be very careful, but we have to move towards greater international exchanges. We are going to go less to China, let's go to South America when the day comes,” he finally concluded. A position which follows that of Bruno Le Maire the day before. The Minister of the Economy then promised that France was ready to engage in a “showdown” in Brussels so that the agreement was not signed as is.

Asked about the mobilization of farmers, Patrick Martin assured that he “shares many of the concerns of farmers on over-regulation and on a degrowth strategy of certain European decision-makers”, while deploring that this is already “starting to have consequences” on the economic plan. “It should not get out of hand (...) because it blocks trucks, deliveries and not just food,” he said.

“Since the end of Covid, we have been in tight flow in the industry and not just in large food stores (...). And so it disrupts the proper functioning of a certain number of automobile factories, for example. For the moment it is not a disaster but we are very attentive,” he continued. To the point of weakening certain businesses? “We’re not there yet,” replied the business manager, while recognizing that “small grains of sand were starting to appear.”

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Furthermore, while business failures are very high in France, the head of Medef conceded that the situation was “not great” and was pushing companies to file for bankruptcy, “especially in the construction sector and its periphery such as real estate agencies or real estate developers. “We must bring investment back to real estate, put a certain number of systems back in place,” he argued, judging today “more interesting” for an individual “to have a cash book savings than putting yourself at risk by investing in real estate.

Foreseeing “a still difficult first and second quarter” for growth and an increase in unemployment, he foresees an improvement to come thanks in particular to “wage increases on average higher than inflation”. “We absolutely must support economic activity,” he insisted, deploring an “extremely penalizing social security system” in France. And to affirm: “this is where we have to reshuffle the cards”.