Emmanuel Macron: Europe Must Become Less Reliant on China and US

French President Emmanuel Macron said he would work to build a Europe that was less dependent on China and the United States.
His comments come as France gradually emerges from an eight-week lockdown.
The coronavirus crisis has exposed how reliant France and the rest of Europe is on supply chains with China and elsewhere.
“This ordeal has exposed flaws and fragilities: our dependence to other continents to get our hands on some goods,” the president said in a televised address to the nation. “I want us to draw all the lessons from what we have learned.”
Mr Macron also said on Sunday that he was accelerating plans to ease the country’s coronavirus lockdown to revive the Euro zone’s second biggest economy more swiftly.
He promised that the cost of keeping companies afloat and people in jobs during the worst economic downturn since World War Two would not be passed to households through taxes.
Restaurants and cafes in Paris would be allowed to reopen fully from Monday, Macron said in a televised address, bringing relief to a hospitality industry battered by the crisis.
“The fight against the epidemic is not finished but I am happy about this first victory against the virus,” Macron said in the address to the nation.
The government expects the economy to shrink by 11 per cent in 2020. The coronavirus emergency had exposed France’s, and more broadly Europe’s, heavy reliance on global supply chains, from the car industry to smart phones and pharmaceuticals, that were paralysed when the epidemic first broke out in China.
“The only answer is to build a new, stronger economic model, work and produce more, so as not to rely on others,” Mr Macron said.
He also touched on the anti-racism protests that have spread to France in the wake of the death of African American George Floyd in the United States.
The global outpouring of anger has forced France to confront allegations from ethnic minorities and rights group of racism and brutality within France’s own law enforcement agencies.
Mr. Macron said skin colour too often reduced a person’s opportunities in France, promising to be“uncompromising” against all discrimination.
However, he insisted that France will not take down statues of controversial, colonial-era figures as has happened in some other countries in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the United States and ensuing worldwide protests against racial injustice.
“The Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history,” Mr. Macron said. (Compiled from wires)
arguments. al