Paris (AFP)

France will be able to use the European recovery plan of 500 billion euros, proposed Monday by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, to "renovate the hospital" and support the sectors hit by the crisis, said the French Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire.

"When we need, for example, to renovate our hospital, we can rely on this support (...) and funding from the European Commission," he said on LCI.

France could also benefit from this recovery plan for the sectors of tourism, the automobile industry and aeronautics, very penalized by the health crisis and its economic consequences, he specified.

The Franco-German couple proposed a recovery plan of 500 billion euros to support the economic recovery of the European Union, via an unprecedented mechanism for pooling the European debt - loans made by the Commission on markets.

"There will indeed be for the first time in European history the common debt, raised (...) to finance direct expenditure in the member states. It is a gesture of solidarity, it is a gesture of efficiency and it's a historic turning point, "insisted Bruno Le Maire.

He also moderated somewhat the calls for an industrial relocation in all directions.

"We depend too much on outside countries, we must relocate part of our production chains, it is essential", especially in the health sector, he recognized.

He called for "giving ourselves the means", among other things through "an attractive fiscal policy" and a drop in production costs - "a set of political decisions that must be taken so that we do not sell illusions to the French but realities ".

But at the same time, "let's also be careful not to give the feeling that we're going to repatriate everything to France. This is not necessarily the right solution," insisted the minister.

"The question is to know (if) we really want to produce everything in France (...): perhaps for masks, the right solution is first to build strategic stocks (...) by retaining the capacity in the event of a crisis to react very quickly "via" a powerful industrial tool "to" regain rapid production capacities ", he argued.

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