On February 9, AAPA members met the French finance minister Roland Lescure at the ministry in Bercy. It was a fascinating conversation, conducted in English – Lescure is a French-Canadian dual citizen and fully bilingual. The subjects ranged from France’s recent very belated budget to the global tariff war and France’s prospects in green energy.

    Some choice quotes:

• “Geopolitics and economics, it’s much more interlinked than it’s ever been” (citing Trump’s threat to raise tariffs on Europeans in his bid for Greenland)
• On the weakness of European capital markets: “I think that the US market gets about 55, 56 % of total VC [venture capital] capital. We [in Europe] have about 5 %.”
• Quoting Trump: “’Tariffs is probably the most beautiful word in English.’ I had a few in mind before he said that.”
• About the US: “It’s not so much the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave that it used to be. It’s not as attractive as it was.” He said that many researchers and other skilled workers were leaving the US for other countries including France.
• About the budget: “There’s going to be much expenditure cuts on the state” – but not, he said, on defence
• On relationships with Britain: “With the UK, any conversation is a negotiation. I don’t feel too sorry for them…. There is not a child and an adult there. I think the UK is pretty good at negotiating and so are we.”
• He said France had won the argument on “European preference” in procurement. “The reason I’m saying that is that everyone else is doing it. The US are doing it, China …. We cannot be just the last baby in the yard that’s running around when everybody’s doing something else in the drawing room…The world is not so flat anymore.” 
• Macron on Europe “was early rather than wrong every time”
• On Elon Musk’s site X: “Things are happening there that shouldn’t be there. Grok has been awful. It’s been putting us all on the nude on the net…Elon Musk has been mixing business and politics now for a bit more than a year and a half since he decided to run behind Trump’s campaign. I regret that.”
• France may need more labour immigration. Because of its ageing population, it will need a million new workers. He predicts that the Rassemblement National may move towards promoting labour migration.
=Simon Kuper