Emmanuel Macron went on Monday morning to the Renault industrial site near Douai (North), to formalize the establishment of a Chinese battery mega-factory.

There he found the president of the region, Xavier Bertrand, reelected the day before, and congratulated him during a short exchange on the regional ones.

Emmanuel Macron arrived Monday morning at the industrial site of Renault near Douai (North), to formalize the establishment of a Chinese mega-factory of batteries and praise the French attractiveness.

Accompanied by three ministers, Gérald Darmanin (Interior), Agnès Pannier-Runacher (Industry) and Franck Riester (Foreign trade), the Head of State met Xavier Bertrand, president reelected on Sunday of the Hauts-de-France region, who is already posing as the "third man" for the 2022 presidential election.

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Emmanuel Macron congratulates Xavier Bertrand

"Congratulations for yesterday", "happy to find you here", launched the President of the Republic.

"I'm happy to be with you. It's a step, but we all know what's behind it, we each know it," he continued.

Xavier Bertrand, for his part congratulated himself on having "succeeded in making the RN go back as much", to which Emmanuel Macron approved, saying that "it proves that when you invest, you get there".

Asked by the boss of Hauts-de-France on abstention, Emmanuel Macron still considered that she "says a lot of things" and that "we will all have to draw the consequences".

For his first trip after the scathing defeat of his party in the regional, the Head of State will formalize the investment of two billion euros by the Chinese group Envision which will create 1,000 jobs on the spot by 2024.

Breathing new life into the Douai factories

However, the President of the Republic seemed more in a hurry to celebrate the success of his policy on foreign investment rather than to deliver an analysis on the regional elections with the one who should stand in his way in 2022. In the middle of the employees , it is a very consensual speech that was heard from the mouths of the two men, a call for union, for the gathering of energies to ensure the future of the electric automobile sector, and the thousands of jobs it promises in the Hauts de France.

AESC, the Japanese battery subsidiary of the Chinese green technology group Envision, will manufacture batteries near the Renault plant in Douai (North), for the Losange compact ranges and for other brands.

This future giga-factory is the second announced in France after that of Stellantis (the group born from the marriage of Peugeot-Citroën and Fiat-Chrysler) and TotalEnergies in Douvrin (North).

The Envision plant will also be the centerpiece of the "ElectriCity" cluster that Renault will launch in the North.

The batteries, added to the assembly of the electric Mégane and R5, should breathe new life into the factories of Douai, Maubeuge and Ruitz.