French parliamentary elections French President Nicolas Sarkozy, fresh from helping to hammer out a hard-won European Union reform treaty that could make it harder to act against protectionism, on Sunday defended France’s activist industrial approach and called on European partners to follow his example.
“Having an industrial strategy is not a right, it is a duty,” he said in a speech at the Le Bourget airshow outside Paris on Saturday. “A country that abandons its factories is a country that has lost its identity.”
