In an interview published Tuesday, February 10 by several European newspapers, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a continental “revolution” to reduce dependence on the United States and China, evoking a “state of geopolitical and geo-economic emergency”. While an informal meeting of the leaders of the Twenty-Seven will be held this Thursday, February 12 on the key issue of competitiveness, the President of the Republic is relaunching the idea of “Eurobonds” to finance massive investments.
1 – What is a “Eurobond”?
“It is the time for the European Union (EU) to launch a common debt capacity, through Eurobonds,” Emmanuel Macron pleaded on Tuesday in an interview with several European newspapers. Otherwise, according to him, the Old Continent would risk being “swept away” from several strategic economic sectors.
This proposal to pool public debts, therefore to borrow together, is old, recalls Eric Dor, director of economic studies at IESEG. Because “one of the financial weaknesses of the EU compared to the United States is that there are 27 public debts. Even those of the largest countries such as Germany, France or Italy, remain small debts compared to the American debt, which is the largest in the world and which appeals to investors because it is very liquid. » This means that this financial asset is processed in very large quantities every day, and therefore that one can place a large buy or sell order without causing a strong variation in the price. This has helped the United States to make the dollar the international reserve currency par excellence.
In the eyes of Emmanuel Macron, we could thus better establish the status of the euro as an international reserve currency. And this would allow countries that are already highly indebted, like France and Italy, which have much less room for maneuver to further significantly increase their public spending, to benefit from reasonable interest rates to make the very large public investments required by the current geopolitical and economic situation, as well as the ecological transition.
This was implemented once, during the Covid crisis, to finance a major European recovery plan of several hundred billion euros, when all economies had been damaged by confinements. “This is the first time that we have made a shared European loan of such magnitude,” notes Eric Dor. The European Commission had paid back the money partly in the form of subsidies, guaranteed by the European budget: with the tacit agreement of the countries that their subsequent contributions to the European budget would have to increase in order to one day be able to repay them. And for another part in the form of a loan to the States: it is up to them to repay the European Union which itself had to repay its loan. It could be the same again.
3 – What do other European countries think?
France still faces reluctance from so-called virtuous countries from the point of view of public finances, such as Germany or the Netherlands. In their eyes, “it’s as if their next-door neighbor, over-indebted because he consumed excessively, came to beg them to kindly co-borrow with him – and at an interest rate higher than theirs – to pay his rent”, image Eric Dor. “German reluctance is all the stronger as France has put itself in a very difficult position by not being able to vote for an austerity budget.”
But on the other hand, “we are very interdependent in Europe,” he recalls: no one has any interest in letting down their neighbors, who are also their first customers. “Especially now, in a geopolitical context where Chinese and American commercial outlets are eroding, you need the European outlet in the single market more than ever.”
date: 2026-02-11 01:00:00