Emmanuel Macron's Private-Equity Migraine Needs New Pills

A spoonful of government intervention is here to help the French takeover medicine go down. Emmanuel Macron’s administration has agreed to take a 1%-2% stake in Sanofi SA’s consumer-health unit Opella to sugar the pill of a US private equity takeover, seen as a critical test of deal-making openness in a country where everything from supermarkets to dairy firms is deemed strategic. Yet what the recent political aches and pains over paracetamol “sovereignty” really show is the scale of the investment gap facing France and Europe.

The scope for meddling with Opella was always going to be high, as my colleague Chris Hughes flagged, given its manufacture of paracetamol brand Doliprane, a fixture in French bathroom cabinets. But remedies like securing minority stakes and job guarantees look more like homeopathy — and are clearly no cure for deteriorating public finances. French government stakes haven’t stopped factory closures or job cuts in the past; nor have they delivered superior returns.