Emmanuel Macron pleads for “a European preference in the purchase of military equipment” and a strengthened European defense industry
“There is no defense without a defense industry in this area. It is about transforming the urgency of support for Ukraine into a long-term effortcontinued Mr. Macron. This is why I accept the fact that we need a European preference in the purchase of military equipment. »
” The path is longadmitted the president. Because, we must be clear-headed, we have decades of underinvestment in our own production. And, basically, the peace dividends meant that Europeans invested insufficiently, which also created a very strong dependence on non-European industry. » He thus pleaded for a strengthening of the European defense industry.
“How do we want to build our sovereignty, our autonomy, if we do not undertake to develop a European defense industry? And so yes, for this we must succeed in building a European preference, succeed in building European industrial programs, assume increased support from the European Investment Bank and assume additional financing. »
For Emmanuel Macron, “the objective of a European industrial defense strategy is to produce more quickly, with more Europeans. So, for us who have a strong defense industry, this is an extraordinary opportunity, because we can also, if we know how to organize ourselves, push our standards.” Because “one of the problems we Europeans have is that we remain too divided when it comes to the defense industry. Our fragmentation is a weakness. We experienced it in a cruel and concrete way during this war [en Ukraine], where sometimes we discovered that our guns were not of the same caliber, that our missiles did not correspond from one to the other and that this actually reduced our ability to act together in the same theater of operations..