Paris. The president of the French Institute (IF), Eva Nguyen Binh, was able to detail on March 5 her new roadmap before the members of the Senate Culture Commission. The latter, testifying to a lot of benevolence towards the president during her hearing, had clearly not read or wanted to take into consideration the report of their colleagues from the Foreign Affairs and Defense Commission on this same roadmap.
Because the senators of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Commission are very annoyed by the fact that the objectives and performance contract (COP) was only submitted to them on December 20, 2024 while the document has been ready since July 2023. And this is not a question of susceptibility. The COP is widely started since it was supposed to cover the years 2024 to 2026, and it is even partly obsolete because the state subsidy fell by 5.5 % in 2025, affecting several objectives. Eva Nguyen Binh explained the delay by the difficulty of bringing her two ministers of supervision to validate the COP.
In its essential lines, the COP 2024-2025 of the French Institute is very similar to the COP 2020-2022 (the year 2023 is not covered, which the senators have also criticized). IF has three main missions: support for the cultural network abroad; support for the export of creators and cultural industries (a turning point operated in 2019 according to the president); And cultural cooperation, which very often takes the form of a debate of ideas.
An extended geographical area
The geographic priorities were both refined and widened since we go from 37 countries in 2020-2022 to three geographic areas in 2024-2025: Africa, Europe and Indopacific … a large part of the world! The president said that all IF continued to operate, including in Ukraine and in the Sahel countries – with the exception of Niger. “French institutes are often the last to close and the first to open”she congratulated herself.
Ultimately, the COP will cover the period 2025-2027, without it being understood if the IF was going to update it and in what proportions. In any case, he still has a large time to start the COP 2027-2030 that the Foreign Affairs and Defense Commission would like to see more focus on the purposes of French cultural action abroad rather than on the means of the operator.
