French President Emmanuel Macron called for the elimination of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), joining a call by Chancellor Friedrich Merz to scrap the new law requiring companies to address their negative impacts on human rights and the environment across their value chains.
Speaking to global business leaders at the “Choose France” International Business Summit on Monday, Macron framed the elimination of the CSDDD as part of a major push to reduce regulatory and compliance burdens on companies to help improve competitiveness by creating a level playing field with the U.S., China and other companies.
Macron said:
“Clearly we are very aligned now with Chancellor Merz… CSDDD and some other regulations have to not just be postponed for one year, but to be put out of the table.”
The CSDDD was initially proposed by the European Commission in February 2022, setting out obligations for companies to identify, assess, prevent, mitigate, address and remedy impacts on people and planet – ranging from child labor and slavery to pollution and emissions, deforestation and damage to ecosystems – in their upstream supply chain and some downstream activities such as distribution and recycling.
The legislation was adopted in May 2024, but only after a long process that ultimately required revisions in the legislation that significantly scaled back the number of companies covered by the law, and extended the timeline to its full implementation.
One of the key factors that jeopardized the passage of the CSDDD legislation was a last minute effort by France to significantly scale back the scope of the new rules to apply only to companies with more than 5,000 employees, instead of the initially proposed 500 employee threshold, effectively removing roughly 80% of businesses from the CSDDD obligations. The legislation was passed with a new threshold of 1,000 employees.
As part of the EU Commission’s Omnibus process launched in February 2025, aimed at significantly reducing the sustainability reporting and regulatory burden on companies, implementation of the CSDDD has been delayed by a year to 2028, and a series of changes to the directive have been proposed, including requiring full due diligence only at the level of direct business partners, reducing the frequency of monitoring the effectiveness of due diligence from annual to every 5 years, and limiting the amount of information that can be requested from small companies. In the leadup to the Omnibus, France had already called for “an indefinite postponement” of the implementation of the CSDDD.
In his speech to business leaders, Macron made clear that he is calling not just to simplify the CSDDD, but to eliminate the law altogether.
Macron said:
“I’m not even speaking about the content. I’m just speaking about how to synchronize with the U.S. and the rest of the world.”
