France’s influence in the European Union is often aimed at prioritising its own economic benefits at the expense of other members, such as Poland, Remix reports.
The French are convinced that Brussels’ interests are in step with France’s. Anything that does not serve France, they argue, cannot serve the EU, can it?
So when the EU expanded two decades ago to include Central European countries, and the French perceived the “Polish plumber”, i.e. Polish labourers, as a threat to France and thus to the EU, they went to great lengths to make life difficult for all guest workers from our part of Europe, not just Poles.
During the following decade, the French fought hard against Polish transport companies, which quickly came to dominate much of the EU market. The war against our logistics firms included the imposition of increasingly harsh and onerous regulations, especially on so-called seconded workers. This was done with ruthless efficiency and as a result many Polish companies were forced out of the market, according to Remix.
Now, according to a business portal, Puls Biznesu, France has opened a new front in its economic struggle with Poland, which has quietly emerged as a world power in battery production. It is now the world’s second largest supplier after China and has Europe’s largest lithium-ion battery factory, LGEnergy Solution in Biskupice.
The French attack on the Polish battery sector is to lobby for an EU regulation that the absurd carbon footprint should not be measured for each individual battery plant, but for the country as a whole where it is located. Given that Poland still gets more than 60 per cent of its electricity from coal, this proposal would be particularly damaging for Poland, but extremely beneficial for France, which gets 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power.
This is likely to be exactly the outcome France seeks under the guise of environmental considerations under the EU’s Green Deal: to drive out Polish competition again – as it did with “Polish plumbers” and transport companies – and possibly extend such regulation to other industries, potentially targeting more sectors for French takeover.
