A Fair Deal Between Public and Private

When public money helps a private company take on a genuinely big risk, building something like Europe's own advanced technology, the public deserves a real, permanent stake in returns, not just a one-time grant that quietly turns into someone else's private fortune.

This is an old idea in new clothes. Centuries ago, trading cities used a contract called the commenda: one partner supplied the capital and stayed home, the other took the goods and the risk on the road, and they shared what came back. We're proposing the same shape for today's biggest bets, especially technology that will shape European life for decades.

Take a European large language model, for instance. It needs serious investment to compete at the frontier. It also needs a guarantee, a kind of golden share, that no matter how attractive an offer gets, public ownership never drops so low that control could slip into foreign hands. Public patience providing the floor, private ambition providing the drive, and neither one able to walk away with everything.