The government is abandoning the idea of ??forcing distributors to sell their fuel at a loss, but Emmanuel Macron urges them to practice the cost price and give up their margin. What might this change for motorists?
The fuel will ultimately not be sold at a loss. The distributors who rose up against the measure announced by the Prime Minister therefore won their case. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, himself announced the abandonment of the project and presented a new solution to compensate for the rise in fuel prices, on 20 Hours on TF1 and France 2, on Sunday September 24. Rather than selling at a loss, distributors are invited to sell their fuel at cost price and therefore to give up their margin on this product.
The cost price operation should be better received by distributors than that of selling at a loss, but a new sequence of negotiations will begin this week between Elisabeth Borne and fuel sellers. If “cost price” operations are presented as a new solution, they are already regularly implemented in certain brands, but above all they should only have limited effects on the cost of fuel. The margins are “very low” on fuels assures Olivier Gantois, president of the French Union of Petroleum Industries (UFIP) speaking to Franceinfo. According to him, this measure will only save motorists “a few cents per liter”, 1 or 2 at most.
Another backpedal by the government: the Head of State announced the return of a fuel allowance while the government has been opposing the reinstatement of the fuel check for weeks. As at the beginning of 2023, a check for “100 euros per car per year” will again be issued. But this aid will be strictly “limited to workers” who “need to drive” and to the most modest households. More precisely, the fuel check will only be granted to the lowest 50% of workers. The fuel allowance could be back in the coming weeks, or even a few months.
