French President Emmanuel Macron will unveil on Thursday details of a much-hyped national stimulus plan for his country, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic which has plunged the French economy into its deepest recession since World War II, reports The Straits Times.
The release of details of the new plan is timed to coincide with the week during which the French traditionally return to work from their August summer holidays.
But the plan is also designed to map out the policies Mr Macron will pursue for the remainder of his presidential term, which expires in May 2022.
Mr Macron insists that the proposals, grandly entitled "France Relaunched", should not be seen as "a strategy to face the difficulty of the moment".
As he told journalists in Paris, the French government has already dealt with present difficulties by unveiling schemes to support companies through the health crisis, and offering to pay the salaries of workers who would otherwise be rendered unemployed.
"France has never before put such a package", claims Mr Macron, and statistics bear him out: the extra spending which his government rolled out already totalled 460 billion euros (S$747 billion).
The "France Relaunched" programme is meant to secure the future; it is, as Mr Macron put it, "not simply a strategy to respond to the consequences of the crisis, but one designed to ensure how our country can emerge stronger".
The broad outlines of the plan have already been trailed by the president on several occasions. Mr Macron intends to put aside about a fifth of the 100 billion euros in cash allocated in the plan to "prepare France for 2030" by encouraging foreign manufacturers to set up factories in the country, or for French manufacturers to return to producing goods on home soil.
This reaffirms a theme many French officials are now emphasising: the belief that the longer-term effects of the pandemic would encourage manufacturers to shorten their global supply lines, and that France can benefit from this anticipated process of "repatriating" production links.
The French president aims to make his country more attractive by emphasising in the plan up to thirty different measures which include everything from the promotion of a more modern tax service to a more flexible policy of hiring and firing employees, one of the biggest hurdles for current investors in France.
"We have profoundly transformed the taxation of capital and therefore investment in France, profoundly reformed the labour market which allows hiring, and fundamentally reformed also the apprenticeship sector," Mr Macron claimed last week during a tour of a French pharmaceutical company which decided to expand its home manufacturing base, rather than move production overseas.