As the ink was drying Monday on a $65.5 billion merger deal promoted by the French government between Sanofi-Synthélabo and Aventis, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took to the podium at his residence, where he had just met with a group of international businessmen.
Launching into a discussion of French competitiveness, Raffarin explained that France had become an exciting destination for foreign investment.
France, he said, was only misunderstood – so much so that the government was planning to begin an advertising campaign at the end of May to attract more foreign investors to the home of Bordeaux wine and high-speed trains. “France has changed,” was the central message of a nine-page PowerPoint presentation on the advertising strategy.
The timing, 24 hours after the French-German drug maker Aventis accepted a E55 billion takeover bid from Sanofi-Synthélabo under government pressure to create a French pharmaceutical champion, suggests that it may not have changed that much after all.
Capitalism à la française is alive and kicking, observers say.
The only thing that has changed is that nobody hides it anymore. Within minutes of announcing the ad campaign, aimed at luring companies from the United States, Japan and Germany to invest in France, Raffarin repeated that for the sake of having “powerful industrial sectors” in Europe, intervention could be justified.