Thierry Breton believes in his destiny and is making sure anyone in doubt knows it. His public statements make clear that the former European commissioner for the internal market (2019 – 2024) sees himself playing a leading role, in France or in Europe, and in the near future. More precisely, in 2027, when French voters will elect a new president. In Brussels, he hopes things will shift at the top of European institutions.
"I have experience turning around impossible situations. That has been my life," Breton declared on France Inter on January 25. This time, he argued, it was the European Union (EU) and, with it, France that needed saving. Between the expansionist aims of Vladimir Putin's Russia, the commercial offensive of Xi Jinping's China and the ideological war waged by Donald Trump's United States against European integration, "the danger is existential," he repeated to Le Monde.
With "[his] team," about which he refused to provide further details, he is working on a "providential project," as he put it, to free Europe from its ten greatest dependencies. In less than five years, he asserted, the Union could "regain its sovereignty" in such strategic sectors as energy, health, digital technology, critical raw materials and payment systems.
