"Brussels is not protecting our factories, our jobs or our industrial sovereignty from Washington"

Jean-Paul Garraud: "Donald Trump just announced a 25% increase in tariffs on European cars. A brutal decision, but unfortunately, not surprising.

Why? Because the United States knows that the European Union always gives in.

Far from defending the interests of its members, Europe has locked itself into a technocratic obsession, disconnected from industrial realities, unable to protect its factories, sectors, and workers. A facade of power that prefers posture over action.

As if submission had become a policy. This blow from Washington is just the latest in a long series.

And the consequences are clear: it is our manufacturers, suppliers, subcontractors, and drivers who will pay the price in the short term with cost increases, in the medium term with factory closures, and in the long term with an irreversible loss of industrial sovereignty.

But let’s not be fooled. This economic attack didn’t come from nowhere. It is also the result of our own renunciations, a strategic blindness that has lasted for years.

For too long, the European Union has imposed disconnected industrial policies, disconnected from the realities on the ground, in the name of a dogmatic ecological transition.

Under the guise of the Green Deal, it erases know-how. It sacrifices our thermal engines, imposes untenable standards, and delivers us, hands tied, to a technology dominated for 20 years by China.

A China that protects, finances, and massively supports its industry, as do the Americans. And in the meantime, Brussels fails to build a real European battery sector.

Projects collapse one after another, due to lack of coordination, lack of will, lack of vision. Worse still, the Commission continues to finance activist NGOs, often radical, that wage an anti-car crusade, undermining our industry, stigmatizing our way of life, and imposing their ideologies through reports and campaigns.

Because of this, this guilt-tripping machine has replaced strategy, the European project. Today, a continent without factories, without energy, without jobs.

A Europe that moves forward without a compass, guided by unrealistic standards, contradictory injunctions, and bureaucratic illusions.

A Europe that, by despising reality, ends up sabotaging what’s left of its industry. It’s time to say stop, to defend our industrial independence, to protect our jobs, our know-how, our competitiveness, to get our feet back on the ground.

Because if Europe continues with this economic suicide, tomorrow it will be too late. And we will have only our silence to mourn what we let disappear without fighting.

Thank you."