German Liberals slam Brussels’ red tape, call for EU ‘regulatory pause’

Germany’s liberal FDP, a member of the country’s three-way coalition government, is calling for an immediate yet temporary halt to EU legislation that would impose additional red tape on businesses, such as the European Green Deal.

While the FDP has long advocated to ease bureaucratic burdens, the junior partner of Germany’s three-way coalition is now setting concrete demands.

“We call on the President of the Commission, Ms von der Leyen, to put on hold, for the time being, all measures that are still planned and that entail bureaucracy or other burdens on the economy,” FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai said on Thursday.

In particular, the FDP took aim at the EU Due Diligence Directive and the European Green Deal for putting pressure on companies.

Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron already called for a regulatory break, which has found fertile ground with Germany’s free market advocates.

According to the FDP, Brussels is the main reason businesses struggle to cope with the bureaucratic burden.

“We […] know that 57% of bureaucracy in Germany currently comes from Europe. That is why we urgently need a bureaucracy stop at the European level,” said Djir-Sarai.

While criticism of over-regulation from Brussels is nothing new, in 2022, the European Commission implemented a ‘one in, one out’ approach to offset newly introduced burdens by removing equivalent ones in the same policy area.

But critics say the economy has yet to see tangible results. Last Friday, Gunther Krichbaum, a member of parliament for the conservative CDU, said that “in 2022, only 688 [EU] regulations were deleted, but 2,429 were added”.

“We need to take the ‘one in, one out’ principle finally seriously,” he stressed at the Bureaucracy Reduction Conference of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK).

While relations between Germany and France have seen better days, dissatisfaction with the amount of EU regulation and a shared view regarding over-regulation among the liberals on either side of the Rhine seems to unite the two governments in this area.

At the end of August, both countries expressed their will to launch an initiative to ask the EU to cut reporting obligations for companies.

“We [the German government] are now preparing an initiative for the next joint Franco-German cabinet meeting,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, also of the FDP, told the DIHK conference last Friday.

“If the President of the French Republic, the German Chancellor and the President of the Commission, who also gave a very eloquent speech on the reduction of bureaucracy, really want it, then we will make it happen […],” he added.

(Kjeld Neubert | Euractiv.de)