Wishful thinking? Despite the fall in commodity prices, inflation, in particular food, remains at very high levels (5.7% in March over one year overall according to INSEE, 15.9% on food). This is not acceptable to the government, and Elisabeth Borne repeated it on France 2, this Thursday morning. Guest of the program “Télématin”, the Prime Minister once again called on the industrialists to reopen trade negotiations.
“Industrialists are expected to be able to pass on the reductions in raw materials to the prices they offer to large retailers. They are asked, as soon as the prices of raw materials have fallen, to reopen negotiations with the distributors”, claimed the tenant of Matignon, taking up the request of his Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire and calling on everyone to take ” his responsibilities”. “The government did it on energy, the large distribution did it on the anti-inflation quarter,” she pointed out.
And Elisabeth Borne asks consumers to see the results quickly. “I hope that it will be seen as soon as possible, that by the end of June we can have concrete, tangible reductions for the French”, she indicated. The Prime Minister therefore wants to be more proactive than the President of the Republic on this issue. “I’m going to be honest, food prices, it’s going to be tough until the end of the summer,” Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with Le Parisien published on Monday.
But this wish could be shattered by the realities on the ground. Tuesday, on BFMTV, Michel-Edouard Leclerc assured that trade negotiations between manufacturers and distributors had already “begun”. But the president of the strategic committee of the E.Leclerc centers specified that these new negotiations – the second in the space of a few months – concerned purchases “for the fall”. “In the second half, we will break inflation”, in particular “with what we are negotiating”, promised the distributor. The objective of the end of June displayed by Élisabeth Borne could therefore prove to be presumptuous.
