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The final report of the Strategy Dialogue on Agriculture is as good as completed. The chairman of the commission, German university Professor Peter Strohschneider, wants to present the paper this week, according to reports. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday. The final editorial changes are currently being made.
There is still no leak. Only the participants in the dialog – farmers, animal and environmental protectionists and representatives of the food industry – have been able to elicit initial details. With all due caution, their reports tend to dampen expectations. It is unlikely to be a blueprint for the Commission’s future agricultural policy.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had promised to present her plans for the sector within 100 days. It is reported that the experts’ proposals on how to strengthen the position of farmers vis-à-vis the retail sector will be quite specific.
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t expect too much: the 30 experts met seven times, some of them for two-day plenary sessions. With such a complex topic, this is certainly not enough time to draw up a comprehensive vision for the future of agriculture. Let’s wait and see.
Have a good day.
Paolo Gentiloni will in all likelihood only be in office for a few more weeks, so the outgoing EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs can speak more freely about political developments in member states. “Resentment against everything and everyone has triumphed,” commented the Italian Social Democrat on the strong performance of the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in Saxony and Thuringia. “The worst European right” and “the worst left” had benefited from this resentment.
In view of German history, the two East German state elections attracted attention far beyond the Federal Republic. The AfD in Thuringia is the first far-right party to win in a federal state since the end of the Second World War. The New York Times, for example, writes of a “worrying sign for the health and future of German democracy.” Both the AfD and BSW are also perceived as stooges of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Gentiloni describing them as “the friends of the Russians in the former satellite Germany of the USSR.”
At the same time, the disastrous performance of the SPD, Greens and FDP in the elections in other capitals raises questions about the current federal government’s ability to act. “The traffic light is finished,” says one diplomat. Some observers expect the FDP to leave the coalition after the state elections in Brandenburg and Chancellor Olaf Scholz to try to continue in a minority government with the Greens until the Bundestag elections at the end of September 2025. Others believe it is more likely that “the agony of the traffic light will continue for another 13 months,” as one foreign expert on Germany puts it. Until then, the federal government will remain paralyzed.
Berlin’s influence on the upcoming course-setting in the new EU legislative period is likely to suffer, for example in the ongoing negotiations on the new multiannual financial framework for the period 2028 to 2035. Chancellor Scholz’s authority had already suffered before the recent elections due to the coalition’s disunity, it is said: his pledges often did not apply to the coalition partners, Robert Habeck and Christian Lindner each pursued their own agenda. “We don’t need to come to Berlin on major issues for the time being,” concludes one diplomat.
The weakness of the three pro-European governing parties is being noted with concern in the European Parliament. “It is shocking that the Chancellor’s party, the SPD, is not even close to the ten percent threshold,” Romanian EPP group Vice-Chair Siegfried Mureșan told Table.Briefings. Equally worrying is how the Greens and Liberals are losing ground. Only the CDU has held its own: as with Donald Tusk’s election victory in Poland over the PiS government last year, it is clear that “only pro-European center-right parties are in a position to counter the populists,” says Mureșan.
Italian MEP Sandro Gozi, one of the three leading Liberal candidates in the recent European elections, calls for greater cooperation between the pro-European forces: “These results show us that the democratic forces of the left, center and right should strengthen their cooperation in order to find concrete solutions at the European and national level.”
An observer from a central European country believes this is the wrong approach. The high level of support for the AfD and BSW in the two eastern German states shows that people there look at problems such as migration, the war in Ukraine or cultural struggles such as gender stereotyping differently. And did not want to have their opinions dictated by West German-dominated parties or media. Only when politics in Germany overcomes this division, for example by changing course on migration policy, could this also succeed in Europe. However, the will to do so is hardly discernible, at least among the traffic light parties in Berlin.
Italian economics expert Michele Geraci, who is close to the right-wing Lega, sees parallels with his own country. Voters in Saxony and Thuringia “voted against the EU, against what NATO has become and against illegal migrants.” These were the same motives that led Italians to vote for the Five Star Movement, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni.
Far-right, nationalist parties have already achieved electoral success in several European countries. In Italy, right-wing Prime Minister Meloni is in power, in the Netherlands, anti-Islamist Geert Wilders is in government and in France, Marine Le Pen believes she has a good chance of becoming the new president in 2027. Even a left-wing populist party with EU-critical, nationalist undertones like the BSW is not a German invention. “Germany is becoming a normal European country,” comments one diplomat.
And yet the AfD’s successes in particular are giving rise to additional fears. The AfD representatives are considered too extreme even by Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, who therefore excluded the MEPs from their new group in the European Parliament. “Right-wing extremist politicians from Germany are much more terrible than those from France, Spain or Portugal,” says one foreign observer.
Moscow, on the other hand, is pleased with the results of the state elections. “Panic in Berlin. In Germany, opponents of Kyiv’s rearmament have prevailed,” headlines the pro-Kremlin newspaper “Argumenty i fakty.” Russian politicians and media have repeatedly used the narrative that Scholz unnecessarily dragged Germany into the war in Ukraine.
It has become obvious to everyone that the Scholz government is not prioritizing Germany’s development and the problems of its citizens, said the speaker of the Russian Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin. According to Volodin, Germany’s economy is no longer competitive because it has lost cheap Russian energy resources. With Viktor Funk, Markus Grabitz, Almut Siefert
The German government is campaigning in Brussels against a planned regulation that could make it more difficult for battery cell factories to locate in Germany. At the end of July, five major German trade associations had already spoken out against the EU Commission’s draft for a delegated act on the battery regulation. From 2028, batteries for EVs are to be subject to maximum values for the CO2 footprint generated during production. Countries with a high proportion of coal-fired electricity would be at a disadvantage. The legislation is intended to regulate the calculating method for the footprint.
The German government is now opposing the draft in a letter to the Commission dated early July, which Table.Briefings exclusively obtained on Monday: “Overall, the method for calculating the carbon footprint of batteries for electric vehicles and the thresholds to be set from 2026 should not undermine investment in the EU Member States in the production of batteries for EVs, but rather help to distinguish clean European production from less climate-friendly batteries from third countries.”
Until now, no official statement from the German government was known on this legal act, which the industry sees as a guiding decision for the establishment of factories for green technologies. Following consultation with the German government, the Commission rejected an initial request from Table.Briefings for access to the document, arguing, among other things, that the statement could influence international relations. A look at the document now shows why.
The German government explicitly mentions the USA and China as third countries. The CO2 footprint of electricity production there is 50 percent higher and twice as high as the EU average respectively. However, the German government apparently wants to ensure that cheap batteries can continue to be imported from China: “It is essential to ensure that the planned maximum values do not hinder European car manufacturers’ access to foreign battery technology and the targets for electric vehicles.”
According to the statement, flexible regulations should ensure that sufficient batteries are available. The German government mentions “pooling” as one option for more flexibility. An explanation is missing. This could mean that the permissible CO2 footprint should not apply to each individual battery but to an average of a larger number of batteries.
However, the most important goal of the German government is that the European average value for specific greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production of currently 270 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour should be decisive in the calculation method for all member states until 2030. Only after a subsequent, gradual transition phase should the national values for the electricity mix apply in full in the delegated act from 2035.
The EU Commission, on the other hand, wants to make the national values binding from the outset. This would benefit countries such as Sweden, Finland and France, which have particularly high shares of renewable energies and nuclear power.
In order to justify its course to its European partners, the German government tends to use general arguments: “Using national electricity mixes too quickly threatens to undermine the confidence of investors in battery cell production and OEMs in manufacturers from the Member States, as the CO2 intensity in the Member States varies greatly in the status quo.” Alternatively, the Commission wants to enable battery manufacturers to connect their factories directly to wind or solar parks. However, Berlin argues that the construction of such lines also requires more time.
It is worth noting that the German government indirectly admits that the certificates favored by the industry as proof of green electricity consumption are susceptible to abuse: “Strictly limiting the crediting of renewable energy installations that are directly connected to the consumer prevents the misuse of certificates, as a direct connection is easier to control than a certificate, but structurally disadvantages offshore wind energy.”
According to the German government, participations or investments by industrial companies in renewable energy plants should also be counted towards the carbon footprint by 2035, whereby there is not only talk of offshore wind farms in various places. This is exactly what the industry associations had also called for.
However, without sufficiently developed electricity grids, fossil-fuel power plants in Germany could have to be ramped up if, for example, the clean electricity from a company-owned wind farm in Spain or the North Sea does not reach the factory in Ludwigshafen. With Markus Grabitz
The objectives of the Recovery and Resilience Facility are at risk. This is according to a report by the EU Court of Auditors, published yesterday, Monday. The report cites delays in the implementation of investments and reforms at the Member State level as the reason.
By the end of 2023, only 70 percent of planned payment applications across the EU had been received by the Commission. Based on the schedules in the agreements between member states and the EU Commission, a total of 104 payment applications should have been received by the end of 2023. In reality, only 73 were received. In terms of the amount of money, payment applications totaling €228 billion were received instead of the planned €273 billion. A total of €182 billion had been paid out by the end of 2023.
There are major differences between the member states. Germany and Italy have submitted all payment applications planned up to the end of 2023 – although in the case of Germany, it was only one. France, on the other hand, has only submitted two-thirds of the planned payment applications to the Commission. Belgium is at only a quarter and the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary are at zero percent.
The implementation of the measures agreed between the Commission and the Member States is even more critical. According to the Member States themselves, only 30 percent have been implemented by the end of 2023. Current figures from the Commission indicate that 23 percent of measures have been verified and an additional 16 percent according to the Member States.
The Court of Auditors warns that the delays in implementation could add up. In addition, the target values in the second half of the implementation period are often more difficult to achieve than the milestones along the way.
As an example, the Court of Auditors cites a milestone from the Italian implementation plan: Italy should have awarded projects for hydrogen production in abandoned industrial areas by the 1st quarter of 2023. While the milestone seems easy to achieve, the final target looks much more ambitious: At least ten projects for hydrogen production in abandoned industrial areas with an average capacity of 1 to 5 MW must be completed by Q2 2026.
The milestones are often about conceptual work, while the final target is aimed at the physical implementation of a project, Court of Auditors member Ivana Maletić told journalists. Due to the accumulated delay, many measures would not be implemented until 2025 and 2026. The delay and potential non-implementation of certain measures jeopardizes the achievement of the Recovery Fund’s goals.
“In some cases, member states will receive substantial sums of money without the agreed measures having been finalized,” said Maletić. In contrast to the disbursement mode in cohesion policy, where the money is usually only paid out later, the RRF money often flows before a measure is implemented. In addition, the Commission has no legal means of reclaiming money paid out from the Member States if the associated measure is not implemented. “This is not sound financial management,” says Maletić.
The deadline on the EU Recovery Fund is also a problem, said Maletić, who is responsible for the report for the Court of Audit. The fund expires in 2026 and there is a risk that the member states will not have implemented many measures by then.
It would be better to extend the deadline for the EU Recovery Fund, said Maletić. Otherwise, the EU would have spent a lot of money but not completed many of the projects. From the point of view of optimal use of public funds, this is not desirable. A spokesperson for the Court of Auditors later clarified that the Court of Auditors could not make any political demands.
In a communication, the EU Commission rejects the assessment that the goal of making national economies more resilient is at risk. It also defended the payment methodology. That the payments are not paid out at the end is provided for in the regulation and is not a risk – it is even part of the “core DNA” of the Recovery Fund to support the member states in implementation.
With regard to the progress of implementation, the EU Commission argues that part of the delay is a consequence of the necessary adjustments to the plan in the wake of the Russian attack in Ukraine. In addition, the speed of implementation has increased in recent months. France, Italy and three other member states have already received more than half of the recovery funds to which they are entitled.
The nomination came two days late, but should nevertheless please EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: Belgium wants to send Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib to the next EU Commission. This was announced by the leader of the liberal MR party, George-Louis Bouchez, in Brussels on Monday. The current EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders is therefore out of the race.
Bouchez praised Lahbib for a successful Belgian EU Council Presidency, which ended in June. The minister had done a “brilliant job” in the six months. The nomination still has to be formally confirmed by the future Belgian government. This may take a few more weeks, as the coalition negotiations have come to a standstill. Until then, Lahbib will continue to serve as Belgian Foreign Minister and run for the Liberals in the local elections in October.
With this decision, Belgium is accommodating von der Leyen, who wants to avoid male dominance in her new Commission. Romania changed its candidate, probably also under pressure from the Commission President: Instead of Victor Negrescu, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu now wants to nominate MEP Roxana Mînzatu, as he said on Monday. Mînzatu had already completed a one-hour interview with von der Leyen on Sunday. ebo/tho
The final report of the Strategy Dialogue on Agriculture is as good as completed. The chairman of the commission, German university Professor Peter Strohschneider, wants to present the paper this week, according to reports. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday. The final editorial changes are currently being made.
There is still no leak. Only the participants in the dialog – farmers, animal and environmental protectionists and representatives of the food industry – have been able to elicit initial details. With all due caution, their reports tend to dampen expectations. It is unlikely to be a blueprint for the Commission’s future agricultural policy.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had promised to present her plans for the sector within 100 days. It is reported that the experts’ proposals on how to strengthen the position of farmers vis-à-vis the retail sector will be quite specific.
At the end of the day, we shouldn’t expect too much: the 30 experts met seven times, some of them for two-day plenary sessions. With such a complex topic, this is certainly not enough time to draw up a comprehensive vision for the future of agriculture. Let’s wait and see.
Have a good day.
Paolo Gentiloni will in all likelihood only be in office for a few more weeks, so the outgoing EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs can speak more freely about political developments in member states. “Resentment against everything and everyone has triumphed,” commented the Italian Social Democrat on the strong performance of the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in Saxony and Thuringia. “The worst European right” and “the worst left” had benefited from this resentment.
In view of German history, the two East German state elections attracted attention far beyond the Federal Republic. The AfD in Thuringia is the first far-right party to win in a federal state since the end of the Second World War. The New York Times, for example, writes of a “worrying sign for the health and future of German democracy.” Both the AfD and BSW are also perceived as stooges of Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Gentiloni describing them as “the friends of the Russians in the former satellite Germany of the USSR.”
At the same time, the disastrous performance of the SPD, Greens and FDP in the elections in other capitals raises questions about the current federal government’s ability to act. “The traffic light is finished,” says one diplomat. Some observers expect the FDP to leave the coalition after the state elections in Brandenburg and Chancellor Olaf Scholz to try to continue in a minority government with the Greens until the Bundestag elections at the end of September 2025. Others believe it is more likely that “the agony of the traffic light will continue for another 13 months,” as one foreign expert on Germany puts it. Until then, the federal government will remain paralyzed.
Berlin’s influence on the upcoming course-setting in the new EU legislative period is likely to suffer, for example in the ongoing negotiations on the new multiannual financial framework for the period 2028 to 2035. Chancellor Scholz’s authority had already suffered before the recent elections due to the coalition’s disunity, it is said: his pledges often did not apply to the coalition partners, Robert Habeck and Christian Lindner each pursued their own agenda. “We don’t need to come to Berlin on major issues for the time being,” concludes one diplomat.
The weakness of the three pro-European governing parties is being noted with concern in the European Parliament. “It is shocking that the Chancellor’s party, the SPD, is not even close to the ten percent threshold,” Romanian EPP group Vice-Chair Siegfried Mureșan told Table.Briefings. Equally worrying is how the Greens and Liberals are losing ground. Only the CDU has held its own: as with Donald Tusk’s election victory in Poland over the PiS government last year, it is clear that “only pro-European center-right parties are in a position to counter the populists,” says Mureșan.
Italian MEP Sandro Gozi, one of the three leading Liberal candidates in the recent European elections, calls for greater cooperation between the pro-European forces: “These results show us that the democratic forces of the left, center and right should strengthen their cooperation in order to find concrete solutions at the European and national level.”
An observer from a central European country believes this is the wrong approach. The high level of support for the AfD and BSW in the two eastern German states shows that people there look at problems such as migration, the war in Ukraine or cultural struggles such as gender stereotyping differently. And did not want to have their opinions dictated by West German-dominated parties or media. Only when politics in Germany overcomes this division, for example by changing course on migration policy, could this also succeed in Europe. However, the will to do so is hardly discernible, at least among the traffic light parties in Berlin.
Italian economics expert Michele Geraci, who is close to the right-wing Lega, sees parallels with his own country. Voters in Saxony and Thuringia “voted against the EU, against what NATO has become and against illegal migrants.” These were the same motives that led Italians to vote for the Five Star Movement, Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni.
Far-right, nationalist parties have already achieved electoral success in several European countries. In Italy, right-wing Prime Minister Meloni is in power, in the Netherlands, anti-Islamist Geert Wilders is in government and in France, Marine Le Pen believes she has a good chance of becoming the new president in 2027. Even a left-wing populist party with EU-critical, nationalist undertones like the BSW is not a German invention. “Germany is becoming a normal European country,” comments one diplomat.
And yet the AfD’s successes in particular are giving rise to additional fears. The AfD representatives are considered too extreme even by Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán, who therefore excluded the MEPs from their new group in the European Parliament. “Right-wing extremist politicians from Germany are much more terrible than those from France, Spain or Portugal,” says one foreign observer.
Moscow, on the other hand, is pleased with the results of the state elections. “Panic in Berlin. In Germany, opponents of Kyiv’s rearmament have prevailed,” headlines the pro-Kremlin newspaper “Argumenty i fakty.” Russian politicians and media have repeatedly used the narrative that Scholz unnecessarily dragged Germany into the war in Ukraine.
It has become obvious to everyone that the Scholz government is not prioritizing Germany’s development and the problems of its citizens, said the speaker of the Russian Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin. According to Volodin, Germany’s economy is no longer competitive because it has lost cheap Russian energy resources. With Viktor Funk, Markus Grabitz, Almut Siefert
The German government is campaigning in Brussels against a planned regulation that could make it more difficult for battery cell factories to locate in Germany. At the end of July, five major German trade associations had already spoken out against the EU Commission’s draft for a delegated act on the battery regulation. From 2028, batteries for EVs are to be subject to maximum values for the CO2 footprint generated during production. Countries with a high proportion of coal-fired electricity would be at a disadvantage. The legislation is intended to regulate the calculating method for the footprint.
The German government is now opposing the draft in a letter to the Commission dated early July, which Table.Briefings exclusively obtained on Monday: “Overall, the method for calculating the carbon footprint of batteries for electric vehicles and the thresholds to be set from 2026 should not undermine investment in the EU Member States in the production of batteries for EVs, but rather help to distinguish clean European production from less climate-friendly batteries from third countries.”
Until now, no official statement from the German government was known on this legal act, which the industry sees as a guiding decision for the establishment of factories for green technologies. Following consultation with the German government, the Commission rejected an initial request from Table.Briefings for access to the document, arguing, among other things, that the statement could influence international relations. A look at the document now shows why.
The German government explicitly mentions the USA and China as third countries. The CO2 footprint of electricity production there is 50 percent higher and twice as high as the EU average respectively. However, the German government apparently wants to ensure that cheap batteries can continue to be imported from China: “It is essential to ensure that the planned maximum values do not hinder European car manufacturers’ access to foreign battery technology and the targets for electric vehicles.”
According to the statement, flexible regulations should ensure that sufficient batteries are available. The German government mentions “pooling” as one option for more flexibility. An explanation is missing. This could mean that the permissible CO2 footprint should not apply to each individual battery but to an average of a larger number of batteries.
However, the most important goal of the German government is that the European average value for specific greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production of currently 270 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour should be decisive in the calculation method for all member states until 2030. Only after a subsequent, gradual transition phase should the national values for the electricity mix apply in full in the delegated act from 2035.
The EU Commission, on the other hand, wants to make the national values binding from the outset. This would benefit countries such as Sweden, Finland and France, which have particularly high shares of renewable energies and nuclear power.
In order to justify its course to its European partners, the German government tends to use general arguments: “Using national electricity mixes too quickly threatens to undermine the confidence of investors in battery cell production and OEMs in manufacturers from the Member States, as the CO2 intensity in the Member States varies greatly in the status quo.” Alternatively, the Commission wants to enable battery manufacturers to connect their factories directly to wind or solar parks. However, Berlin argues that the construction of such lines also requires more time.
It is worth noting that the German government indirectly admits that the certificates favored by the industry as proof of green electricity consumption are susceptible to abuse: “Strictly limiting the crediting of renewable energy installations that are directly connected to the consumer prevents the misuse of certificates, as a direct connection is easier to control than a certificate, but structurally disadvantages offshore wind energy.”
According to the German government, participations or investments by industrial companies in renewable energy plants should also be counted towards the carbon footprint by 2035, whereby there is not only talk of offshore wind farms in various places. This is exactly what the industry associations had also called for.
However, without sufficiently developed electricity grids, fossil-fuel power plants in Germany could have to be ramped up if, for example, the clean electricity from a company-owned wind farm in Spain or the North Sea does not reach the factory in Ludwigshafen. With Markus Grabitz
The objectives of the Recovery and Resilience Facility are at risk. This is according to a report by the EU Court of Auditors, published yesterday, Monday. The report cites delays in the implementation of investments and reforms at the Member State level as the reason.
By the end of 2023, only 70 percent of planned payment applications across the EU had been received by the Commission. Based on the schedules in the agreements between member states and the EU Commission, a total of 104 payment applications should have been received by the end of 2023. In reality, only 73 were received. In terms of the amount of money, payment applications totaling €228 billion were received instead of the planned €273 billion. A total of €182 billion had been paid out by the end of 2023.
There are major differences between the member states. Germany and Italy have submitted all payment applications planned up to the end of 2023 – although in the case of Germany, it was only one. France, on the other hand, has only submitted two-thirds of the planned payment applications to the Commission. Belgium is at only a quarter and the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary are at zero percent.
The implementation of the measures agreed between the Commission and the Member States is even more critical. According to the Member States themselves, only 30 percent have been implemented by the end of 2023. Current figures from the Commission indicate that 23 percent of measures have been verified and an additional 16 percent according to the Member States.
The Court of Auditors warns that the delays in implementation could add up. In addition, the target values in the second half of the implementation period are often more difficult to achieve than the milestones along the way.
As an example, the Court of Auditors cites a milestone from the Italian implementation plan: Italy should have awarded projects for hydrogen production in abandoned industrial areas by the 1st quarter of 2023. While the milestone seems easy to achieve, the final target looks much more ambitious: At least ten projects for hydrogen production in abandoned industrial areas with an average capacity of 1 to 5 MW must be completed by Q2 2026.
The milestones are often about conceptual work, while the final target is aimed at the physical implementation of a project, Court of Auditors member Ivana Maletić told journalists. Due to the accumulated delay, many measures would not be implemented until 2025 and 2026. The delay and potential non-implementation of certain measures jeopardizes the achievement of the Recovery Fund’s goals.
“In some cases, member states will receive substantial sums of money without the agreed measures having been finalized,” said Maletić. In contrast to the disbursement mode in cohesion policy, where the money is usually only paid out later, the RRF money often flows before a measure is implemented. In addition, the Commission has no legal means of reclaiming money paid out from the Member States if the associated measure is not implemented. “This is not sound financial management,” says Maletić.
The deadline on the EU Recovery Fund is also a problem, said Maletić, who is responsible for the report for the Court of Audit. The fund expires in 2026 and there is a risk that the member states will not have implemented many measures by then.
It would be better to extend the deadline for the EU Recovery Fund, said Maletić. Otherwise, the EU would have spent a lot of money but not completed many of the projects. From the point of view of optimal use of public funds, this is not desirable. A spokesperson for the Court of Auditors later clarified that the Court of Auditors could not make any political demands.
In a communication, the EU Commission rejects the assessment that the goal of making national economies more resilient is at risk. It also defended the payment methodology. That the payments are not paid out at the end is provided for in the regulation and is not a risk – it is even part of the “core DNA” of the Recovery Fund to support the member states in implementation.
With regard to the progress of implementation, the EU Commission argues that part of the delay is a consequence of the necessary adjustments to the plan in the wake of the Russian attack in Ukraine. In addition, the speed of implementation has increased in recent months. France, Italy and three other member states have already received more than half of the recovery funds to which they are entitled.
The nomination came two days late, but should nevertheless please EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: Belgium wants to send Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib to the next EU Commission. This was announced by the leader of the liberal MR party, George-Louis Bouchez, in Brussels on Monday. The current EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders is therefore out of the race.
Bouchez praised Lahbib for a successful Belgian EU Council Presidency, which ended in June. The minister had done a “brilliant job” in the six months. The nomination still has to be formally confirmed by the future Belgian government. This may take a few more weeks, as the coalition negotiations have come to a standstill. Until then, Lahbib will continue to serve as Belgian Foreign Minister and run for the Liberals in the local elections in October.
With this decision, Belgium is accommodating von der Leyen, who wants to avoid male dominance in her new Commission. Romania changed its candidate, probably also under pressure from the Commission President: Instead of Victor Negrescu, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu now wants to nominate MEP Roxana Mînzatu, as he said on Monday. Mînzatu had already completed a one-hour interview with von der Leyen on Sunday. ebo/tho