TWO decades ago, France attracted much derision when it passed a law protecting yoghurt maker Danone from a foreign takeover on the grounds it was a ‘strategic’ industry.

If a country can go to such lengths on behalf of ultra-processed milk derivatives, how much more should it do to keep control of its shipping industry?

Yet as voters head to the polls for the first round of parliamentary elections this Sunday, the two frontrunners have converged on the policy of scrapping tonnage tax.

Edouard Louis-Dreyfus, president of shipowners’ association Armateurs de France, is right to highlight the disastrous consequences were such a policy ever to be enacted.

Hundreds of vessels would inevitably flag out, marking the end of La Grande Nation as a flag state for any beyond a handful of entities with public sector shareholdings.

Such a development would be an affront to France’s powerful sense of national sovereignty.

Realistically, these days France is no more of a shipping power than Britain is, and few of the electorate even have heard of tonnage tax. Fewer still will see it as a significant determinant of who they vote for.

In populist terms, tonnage tax is an easy mark. It can all too easily be painted as a subsidy worth €9.4bn ($10bn) to fat cat shipowners between 2020 and 2023, depriving the public purse of money that would be far better spent on schools and hospitals.

Yet it is there for a purpose. Since the 1970s, open registries sparked a mass exodus from European flags by offering low or no-tax flagging services, in exchange for a basic up-front sign-on fee.

Government after government was forced to recognise that if they wished to keep a national flag at all, they needed a counteroffer based on exemption from corporation tax, in exchange for a nominal levy on capacity.

Around two dozen EU countries now offer tonnage tax regimes and France cannot afford to be the exception.

Appeals to patriotism probably have more purchase on the other side of the Channel than here. But they can only go so far.

French shipowners cannot compete on the basis of paying corporate taxation at 25% when their rivals do not pay any tax at all.

Liberté and fraternité necessarily entail égalité with the rest of the EU. Guillotine tonnage tax perks and shipping companies will have little choice but to shift their mobile assets to more amenable jurisdictions.

It is not even as if the move would be the nice little earner politicians imagine it to be. The €9.4bn French shipowners ostensibly dodged in a three-year period represents a one-off, a reflection of the abnormal profits that accrued in the wake of the pandemic.

The annual average cost to the French treasury between 2010 and 2020 was less than €50m, a far more modest sum spread over around 60 shipping companies, most of them small.

Leading the polls is Rassemblement National, which seems set to take a plurality of seats. Its prospects of obtaining an outright majority are less clear.

The party is keen to present its relatively recent evolution from the far right to the hard right as evidence of a maturity that finally renders it eligible to govern in a democracy.

Big business reads the room

Media reports suggest RN leader Marine Le Pen has reportedly been seeking to underline this newfound respectability by making special efforts to woo business leaders.

Heads of big companies are said to have read the room and been willing to reach pragmatic accommodation, especially given the old-school socialist tax-and-spend programme put forward by RN’s chief rivals.

The left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance is also calling for an end to tonnage tax, leaving little to choose from a shipping point of view.

Yet Louis-Dreyfus tells us that neither RN nor NFP have consulted the Armateurs de France on their plans. That alone says much about shipping’s perennial Cinderella status in terms of its political clout in rich countries.

There are plenty of reasons not to wish RN well, not least its flirtations with Frexit and suspicions that its overtly racist past has not entirely been overcome. But Lloyd’s List does not have a vote in the coming contest.

Whichever candidate gets the keys to the Hôtel Matignon, the Parisian equivalent of 10 Downing Street, next month, they need to listen to Armateurs de France and major French shipping companies such as boxship giant CMA CGM.

Let them also remember that the manufacture of yoghurt is not a strategic industry. But shipping really is.