Welcome to Better Europe’s weekly update on EU Affairs.
BUY EUROPEAN WITH OUR TAXPAYER MONEY PLEASE
Long overdue, the EU has finally realised that spending taxpayer’s money should be in line with our overall European interests, and not just getting the cheapest low-quality products and services. Commissioner Séjourné finally presented his baby this week: a new Public Procurement Act to modernise and simplify public procurement rules, turning 2 trillion euros of annual spending power into a tool for strategic autonomy, resilience, and sustainability, and not just cost-cutting. The core of the plan? Introduce “European preference” criteria for strategic sectors, mandatory quality criteria including optional environmental and social standards, and a push for digitalisation with a single procurement marketplace. But as always, there is a catch: public authorities can ignore the quality rules if they can demonstrate “how quality will otherwise be ensured”. And Buy European? Well, if it includes purchasing from non-EU countries with a free-trade-agreement such as the UK, the door is pretty much open to anyone except China in the long run.
BANK CAPITAL: NOT LOWER, JUST “MODERN REALITIES”
The banking competitiveness proposals due early next year will not be about lowering capital requirements, Commissioner Albuquerque reassured left-wing MEP Jussi Saramo in a Parliament debate this week. Fresh out of a meeting with top-level national civil servants a day earlier, Albuquerque stressed that recalibration isn’t about weakening standards, it is simply adjusting them to “modern realities”. Nevertheless, banks claim the prudential framework is choking them, along with market fragmentation and complex international standards. The Commission’s report on banking competitiveness published earlier this summer does read like a love letter to short-term profitability, not the structural reform Europe needs — resilience in the face of AI and climate chaos, real economy lending, and tackling fragmentation, as MEP Lara Wolters put it. The Commissioner wants to square the circle with a “small bank regime” that applies proportionality based on business models, and not just size, while giving big banks more leeway to encourage cross-border mergers. But with cross-border champions suffering from 2008 financial crisis traumas and national supervisors guarding their turf, anything more than a quick-fix on capital will take time to deliver.
MACRON AND VON DER LEYEN AIM FOR THE STARS
Space is indeed Europe’s new frontier. At least that’s what President Macron and President von der Leyen want to make us believe, speaking at used this week’s space summit in Paris. With 20 billion euros in deals signed for anything from cargo capsules to lunar landers, Europe is suddenly treating space like the latest European strategic objective — not just for science, but for geopolitical dominance. Why suddenly now? Well, Ukraine. And SpaceX and Blue Origin didn’t show up for the Paris summit, because… Trump. If Europe cannot rely on others, we need to build our own infrastructure for satellite communications and images. Macron proposal for European “shared governance” sounds good, as do the 350 satellites under the IRIS2 project. But without real money and political will, Europe may struggle to turn ambition into reality, especially as the US spends over three times as much of its (higher) GDP on space.