When a legislative mandate starts drawing to a close, politicians start positioning themselves ahead of elections, bureaucrats in political offices start landing new posts, and leaders start thinking about their next move.
Meanwhile, external observers ask themselves: What will happen next? The most consumed EU bubble insiders know all too well that the election period is when the cards are reshuffled, often with unexpected outcomes.
The only certainty seems to be that the next European Parliament will move its centre of gravity to the right, and the resulting majority will likely have a different political orientation from the current one.
Where does that leave us regarding the next European Commission’s agenda?
In short, the new Commission will have to come to terms with the fact that there is very little left to regulate. From the Green Deal to the digital transition, the EU has passed an enormous corpus of new rules that someone must now enforce.
Policing existing legislation is much less glamorous than passing new ones.
There is always a certain amount of excitement (and public attention) when something new is put on the table, compared to getting one’s hands dirty with procedural details and dull regulatory dialogues.
However, one can kick the can down the road only so far.
The current Commission showed little interest in the implementation of existing rules. Take the General Data Protection Regulation, which the EU executive boasts as the ultimate example of Europe’s role as a global regulator.
The application of the data protection rulebook has been taking its time, primarily due to the enforcement architecture that sees a bottleneck in Ireland, where most Big Tech companies are based.
Yet, the Commission did not bother to set up a mechanism for monitoring its much-cherished privacy law until the European Ombudsman obliged them to do it. This careless approach won’t cut it anymore.
With the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the Commission is set to become the regulator for the wealthiest companies on the planet. Expectations are running high, and the EU executive has to regain its credibility after a string of high-profile losses in competition court cases.
The other challenge the next Commission will face is putting its money where its mouth is. Because right now, whenever the EU executive mentions a multi-billion euro initiative, it is hard to take it seriously.
The much-hyped EU Sovereignty Fund, renamed Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, is just the latest example of a complex repackaging of existing commitments and a shiny new website to hide the fact that no fresh resources are in sight.
To be fair, the reason why ‘bullshit rules in Brussels’, as the Economist put it bluntly, dates back to the Juncker Plan, which normalised including also ‘crowded-in’ private investments in the final figure.
The scant success of the Juncker Plan should have served as a warning that a more serious and transparent approach was needed. That sense of urgency is ever more relevant as the United States and China have rolled out enormous stimulus packages to gain an edge in green tech and semiconductors.
Europe’s attempt to keep up with a more aggressive industrial policy has so far fallen short, not for lack of ambition for a ‘strategic autonomy’, but for a mere lack of resources.
After EU countries agreed to a massive €723 billion plan to recover from the COVID pandemic, there does not seem to be any appetite to pool more resources together.
As a result, initiatives such as the Net Zero Industry Act, the Chips Act, and others have only risible resources. The problem goes at the core of what the European Union is meant to be and, as usual, is well represented by a divergence between the Franco-German motor of European integration.
Paris is pushing for a more muscular industrial policy backed by common EU resources, including joint debt. Berlin is allergic to the idea and prefers that every country goes its way – also because it has deeper pockets to push industrial initiatives at the national level.
A joint debt means having a shared destiny, the backbone of a political community. But for the Germans, the EU is primarily a market rather than a place to solve common challenges. If this tension is not resolved, Europe’s wealth is likely to keep eroding.
Ironically, the first victim of a more muscular interventionist approach in the economy might be the person who embodied it the most in Brussels, Thierry Breton. Despite being in charge of three Commission departments, the Frenchmen did not move the mark in forming the craved European champions.
As a result, in the next Commission, Paris will be tempted to put its hands on the real control room of the single market, the EU competition department. But it is hard to see how Breton might become the EU antitrust chief, as more liberal countries will ask for a more reassuring profile.
If no fresh money can be put on the table, at least relaxation of the EU state aid framework and market concentration rules is likely in order. But picking economic winners can hardly be compatible with the principles of the European single market.
Another hurdle where the next Commission will have to square the circle.
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The Roundup
EU policymakers reached a political agreement on the Data Act in the late hours of Tuesday (27 June).
The European Commission’s ‘Euro 7’ proposal on vehicle pollution standards came under fire again on Tuesday (27 June), with the leading EU lawmaker on the file slamming it as harmful to consumers and automakers and arguing that substantial changes are needed.
EU member states, the European Commission, and the European Parliament agreed on Tuesday (27 June) to create a €300 million fund to incentivise the bloc’s joint procurement of arms to replenish stockpiles and help Ukraine.
Germany is pushing South Africa to phase out coal as agreed, despite domestic opposition to the planned mothballing of aged power plants amid repeated power outages in the African country.
A Russian missile struck a restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday (27 June), killing at least eight people and wounding 56, emergency services said, as rescue crews combed the rubble in search of casualties.
Don’t forget to check out our Green and Health Briefs.
Look out for…
- The European Council meets on Thursday and Friday
- Vice President Dubravka Šuica participates in the EPP Summit, while Commissioner Simson attends the Renew Leaders’ Summit.
Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
