What makes Trump agree with Biden (and Sánchez)

I have asked myself many times what would have happened if a program like the Inflation Reduction Act, that macro stimulus package promoted by the United States for the green transition, which promotes its industry (Made in America) over foreign ones, had been approved by Donald Trump in Joe Biden's place. Or how the $8.5 billion in direct public aid that the Democrat has just granted to Intel to implement microprocessor plants, in addition to loans and tax relief, would have fallen in public opinion. Or if Trump, and not Biden, had publicly and frontally opposed the purchase agreement of the American company US Steel by the Japanese company Nippon Steel, causing the American company's stock to fall, just with his words, up to 12%.

But for that last one, less imagination is needed, because it has happened. The president of the United States shook the market in mid-March by publicly speaking out against the operation of the Japanese company, despite being an allied country, which has offered 14.9 billion dollars for what is an iconic American steel firm, with 22,000 workers (and its headquarters located in none other than Pennsylvania, a very sensitive state for the presidential elections in November).

“It is important that we keep American steel companies strong, with American workers,” said Democrat Biden on March 15, in one of those statements with which one would play who said what between politicians with such a diverse profile. A couple of months earlier, Republican Donald Trump announced that, if he won the elections and became president again, he would “block the operation immediately.”

Biden and Trump do not even agree on where the sun rises, but the offer of a foreign industrial giant for one of those legendary firms of the American manufacturing fabric manages to align them, each in their own style, and that is a sign of the time. Last week, Brussels managed to get a Chinese railway company, CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive, to withdraw from a public tender in Hungary after opening an investigation into illicit subsidies.

In Spain, the Government has publicly expressed its discomfort with the offer that the Hungarian company Magyar formalized yesterday for the emblematic train firm Talgo, amid suspicions of links with Russia. It has also chosen to return to the capital of Telefónica, 26 years after its privatization, in reaction to the entry into the capital of STC, the operator controlled by the Saudi sovereign fund.

Japan's is not an offer with suspected links to Russia nor does it come from a regime like that of Mohamed bin Salmán, but it strikes a chord today for citizens in the United States (and around the world). It is difficult to imagine that the Endesa takeover and countertakeover affair would have had the same outcome today as in 2009: it became the subsidiary of an Italian company (Enel) that sold its entire Latin American business.

What would have been disdained as economic nationalism 15, 10 or even five years ago is today considered acceptable protectionism of the strategic interests of each country, a trend exacerbated by the pandemic, geopolitical tensions and the impoverishment of the middle classes, in partly due to the deindustrialization of economies.

Many have put their hands on their heads in the United States, Europe and Spain. Biden can be criticized for stopping an operation with purely sentimental arguments, since Nippon Steel has promised to maintain jobs and production in the United States and the American firm is not what it was: from 340,000 workers during World War II it has gone down to little more than 20,000 and the third in the country, while the Japanese is the fourth in the world. There is also criticism for the extension of the anti-takeover decree of the Government of Pedro Sánchez. And, more generally, the arbitrariness with which what is a company of strategic interest can be defined or not. But it is legitimate to think and react to the defensive step that so many countries have taken, to the controlling shareholder you want in companies that manage your most basic networks and services, or to remember and fear the old factories of the American Midwest converted into empty shells.

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