Luca De Meo greets Renault Choose Kering the Gucci house luxury giant. The Paris Stock Exchange immediately issues its sentence: the shares of the historic French car manufacturer collapsed up to 7%, while Kering toasted with a +9.4%. On the stock exchange, as in life, there is no doubt: the future is not on four wheels. It is on the fashion catwalks. But behind the financial news there is a very strong political-economic message: if also de Meo gives up everything it really means that the European automotive is a ship that embarks water. The exit sounds like an alarm bell, and together an accusation against an energy transition managed in a schizophrenic way by Brussels
Who is de Meo? Arrived in 2020, he took a Renault half scrapped by the pandemic and brought it back to the track: he cut the costs, raised his volumes, rewritten the alliance with Nissan, transformed a wheelchair into an industrial boutique. On the stock exchange, the stock had risen by 90%. Still, today he leaves. Why?
Because even the best managers do not miracles if the context conditions are hostile. And the European automotive, close among Chinese prices, the American duties and the environmental obsessions of Brussels, has become hell. The big culprit? The European Green Deal. A bizarre idea transformed into a regulatory nightmare. Brussels has decided that from 2035 there will be no more internal combustion cars. It doesn’t matter if there is still no adequate charging network. It doesn’t matter if China controls it. It doesn’t matter if an electric utilityman today costs more than an average salary. The important thing is to wave the green flag. Because the industry is asked to achieve objectives without providing them with tools. A bit like ordering a baker to produce double the Panema by cutting the flour in two.
De Meo had proposed the “car Airbus”: A large European industrial alliance to produce small, accessible and profitable electric cars. But without a serious political direction, and with such a ruthless Asian competition, the idea remains firm in the pits. Now that he leaves, who will guide this phantom revolution? A bureaucrat with the emissions balance? A living room ecologist? Certainly, nobody who really knows the road.
Meanwhile, Renault remains without a guide. And it’s not just a matter of governance: it is an identity crisis. Who will be the new CEO? How will the alliance be managed with Nissan, who already settles today? How will the pressures of the Macron government be addressed, who wants to make drones do a company born to make cars? And above all: who will defend Renault from Brussels’ Diktat Verdi?
Renault has 15% in the hands of the French state. But if the state is the first to follow ideologies instead of markets, then the fate of the automotive is marked. Kering, for its part, welcomes De Meo with enthusiasm. And how to blame him? The future, in Europe, is easier to do it with bags than with engines. The luxury is light, fragrant, intangible. The industry is heavy, energetic, criminal. Yet it is precisely the industry that gives work, exports, technology. Whoever loses De Meo is not just Renault. It is the same idea that Europe can still have a large automotive industry. But if politicians do not change march, the only steering wheel that will remain will be that of nostalgia.
