“The European Union is a bureaucratic power that spends its time issuing regulations.” This remark was uttered not by Donald Trump’s entourage nor by European populists, but by billionaire French businessman Bernard Arnault. At the recent shareholders' meeting in Paris of luxury goods group LVMH, its CEO and France’s richest man struck a note that is at odds with prevailing opinion on this side of the Atlantic.
According to him, the problem is not Donald Trump and his decision to impose simplistically-calculated customs duties on any region running a trade surplus with the United States. In Arnault’s eyes, if Washington does end up reinstating 20% tariffs on European goods, as announced on April 2nd, the blame will instead lie squarely with the European Union (EU). “If Europe can't negotiate intelligently, there will be consequences for many businesses,” he declared.
Bernard Arnault thus stands firmly opposed to any retaliatory action against Donald Trump. He even went so far as to indirectly praise Brexit, lauding the negotiating style of “our British friends”, which he contrasted sharply with Brussels’ bureaucracy. “There isn’t a week that goes by without us having to deal with a new regulation,” he lamented.
At this shareholders' meeting Bernard Arnault was unmistakably political and openly embraced a pro-Trump stance akin to that of American libertarians. He even declared his support for a sweeping transatlantic free trade area with no tariffs, a notion backed just days earlier, on April 5th, by US billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk during a conversation with Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Italian party Lega.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The Tesla boss also declared at the time that there were “too many rules and regulations” in Europe and that Brussels was “amplifying [that situation] greatly”. Observers were quick to point to an apparent gulf between the declared approaches of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but the truth may be more complex. The threat of tariffs may serve Washington as a lever to pile pressure on Brussels, particularly to unpick regulations that impact large American tech firms.
This is where the interests of Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk coincide: the head of LVMH is also calling for sweeping deregulation that would allow the American tech giants to tighten their grip on European economies while giving him, in turn, easier access to the United States market.
Once the interests of the multinationals are safeguarded, it would then be possible to create a transatlantic market in which American deregulation would put pressure on the social and redistributive welfare systems in Europe. There is, therefore, no real contradiction here, but rather the signs of a new social counter-revolution, one with which the richest man in France is fully on board.
Trump ally
Bernard Arnault is thus acting as an ally of Donald Trump in Europe and in France. Nor does he shy away from deploying his usual tactic, proclaiming the threat to local jobs. This is an approach he has used to great effect for decades. For him, the issue of tariffs “requires the utmost attention from European governments, and in particular the French government, if they wish to avoid severe social consequences”. In plain language: Europe must either bow to Washington’s demands or brace itself for mass job losses.
Implicit in his words was a warning that he would not hold back from such actions. If tariffs are introduced, his group may look to ramp up production on the other side of the Atlantic. That is to say, a chunk of European output would be shipped off to the United States. This would be rather rich coming from a group that prides itself on its French roots, and whose brand is closely tied to Paris. Yet this is standard practice for LVMH, a group that has made outsourcing the linchpin of its strategy, including when a country such as Romania dares to raise the minimum wage.
This threat, however, amounts to handing Donald Trump a powerful bargaining chip, as the US president believes that tariffs are the best way to bring industrial production back home to American soil. Bernard Arnault’s alignment with Trumpism is thus complete.
Bernard Arnault’s position should come as no surprise. He is a long-time friend of Donald Trump, whom he met in New York in the early 1980s, during the French businessman's self-imposed exile when the Left came to power in Paris. France’s richest man was once again prominent at Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20th, as he had been back in 2017.
In 2019, Arnault went as far as to offer a public gesture of goodwill to his friend by inaugurating a Louis Vuitton handbag factory in Alvarado, in the heart of rural Texas, alongside the then-president. That site became a showpiece for Trump’s campaign of industrial revival. While a failure from a business standpoint, LVMH kept it running. It was, after all, the price to pay to prevent tariffs being slapped on the group’s champagne and cognac.
Bernard Arnault has therefore enjoyed close ties with Donald Trump for many years. Yet in France, he has also worked to cultivate a warm relationship with Emmanuel Macron and, in particular, the president’s wife Brigitte Macron, who has taken part in several of LVMH's public relations exercises. Unlike another French businessman billionaire, Vincent Bolloré, Arnault seeks to cast himself as more centrist. But this recent very public political outburst could well signal, or confirm, a turning point.
Crisis in the luxury market
It should be noted that LVMH is now in a tricky situation. In 2024, the group saw its sales fall by 2% on a like-for-like basis and its net profit dropped by 17%. Arnault built his firm’s success on two main pillars: cutting costs and banking on the rise of the Chinese market. Yet since the Chinese property bubble burst in 2021, household spending there has been under strain. The losses sustained in the housing sector have forced wealthy Chinese households to rethink their spending priorities and luxury sales have been the first to suffer.
On top of that, there is also a deeper shift under way: the burnout of the luxury consumption model itself. To maintain growth, firms in the sector - with LVMH at the fore - have sought to “normalise” luxury by widening its appeal beyond the upper echelons of society. But when something becomes common it loses its exclusivity and, as a result, the justification for its price. This point was underlined by Frédéric Grangié, head of Chanel’s jewellery and watch division, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in October 2024, when he spoke of “luxury fatigue”.
The luxury sector is thus now buckling under the weight of these twin pressures. And LVMH, the group that has reaped the most from this model, is unsurprisingly bearing the brunt of these changes.
In such a climate, Arnault can ill afford to see his sales across the Atlantic hit by tariffs. Once again, he is reaping the results of his own strategy. In its pursuit of growth, LVMH has aimed to spread its products as widely as possible. But that has made its sales more sensitive than before to price swings.
A high price was once the hallmark of luxury. A steep price was, in some ways, a selling point in itself; it underlined the item’s exclusivity. That still holds true to some extent, of course. But LVMH’s customer base, especially in wines and spirits, has grown wider and, on average, less well-off. These buyers are more price-conscious and may simply stop buying when prices become too high. And the group’s wines and spirits division is already finding things tough. In 2024, its sales fell by 11% year on year.
A turning point
Bernard Arnault’s recent remarks are thus the sign of a form of panic. On April 15th, LVMH shares endured a 'Black Tuesday' on the Paris stock market, tumbling by 7.6% in one day and falling below 500 euros for the first time since December 2020. Over the year to Friday April 18th, the share price had dropped by 39.06%. Indeed, earlier that same week LVMH’s market value - the combined worth of all its shares - briefly slipped beneath that of its rival Hermès, a group once viewed by Arnault as ripe for the taking.
As ever, to salvage things the billionaire is turning to politics. Since the dissolution of the National Assembly in June 2024, relations between the Élysée and the LVMH boss have cooled. Arnault has railed against a rise in “taxes” in the 2025 budget, despite an overall climate that remains highly favourable to large firms in France.
But with the economic pressure only mounting, the lure of abandoning pro-European Macronism for Elon Musk-style Trumpism is stronger than ever, all in order to secure better terms for his goods. And one thing needs to be made clear: the Trumpist camp in Europe, the one that bemoans European “regulations”, that preaches “negotiation” rather than retaliation, is the far-right, stretching from Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) in France to Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
The tone of his speech at the April 17th shareholders’ meeting left little doubt about Bernard Arnault’s drift towards this camp. The ultra-rich businessman, who has no wish to loosen his grip on his empire and who on that day secured the right to lead it until the age of 85 (he is currently 76), is not ready to relinquish his obsession with amassing ever more. And to that end, he is ready to go to any lengths, politically. Once a friend of Chinese Communist Party leaders in order to gain access to the People’s Republic’s markets, he now champions Trump-style libertarianism to shore up his holdings across the Atlantic.
This shift is hardly a surprise, however: a growing share of European capital, especially transnational capital, is seeking to restore growth through a libertarian playbook now fronted by Elon Musk. Recently, another billionaire close to Emmanuel Macron, shipping boss Rodolphe Saadé, used a visit to the Oval Office to confirm a major investment in the United States.
But the political consequences of such a path are concerning. Bernard Arnault is a highly influential figure in France, as Mediapart has repeatedly reported. He owns one of the country’s biggest media groups, which includes daily titles Le Parisien and Les Échos, and wields no small sway over French public life. If this support for the far-right is confirmed, it will be a clear sign that French capitalism has now thrown in its lot with the xenophobic camp to protect its interests.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter