The Franco-Italian investment relationship offers one of the most instructive case studies in the tensions that arise when two major European economies deploy national security tools against one another's strategic assets. Over the past decade, Paris and Rome have engaged in a sequence of high-profile confrontations that reveal, more clearly than any academic analysis, the limits of European economic integration when sovereign industrial interests are at stake.

The pattern is consistent. In 2017, Vivendi's silent accumulation of a 24% stake in Telecom Italia prompted the exercise of the golden power. Within weeks, President Macron reversed his predecessor's commitments by nationalising STX France as Fincantieri's takeover bid succeeded, with an Italian minister explicitly drawing the link between the two transactions. A second Franco-Italian confrontation over the Chantiers de l'Atlantique ran until 2021, when the project was quietly abandoned — both governments relieved to exit a transaction that had exposed the structural incompatibility between European industrial ambition and national sovereignty reflexes. Most recently, Microtecnica/Safran (2023-2024) inverted the dynamic once more.

The similarities of these episodes is more significant than their discrepancies. Each illustrates the growing tendency of European governments to treat intra-EU investment through the same lens of strategic suspicion previously reserved for non-European acquirers, a development that sits uneasily with the principle of an European single market.