Welcome to Better Europe’s weekly update on EU Affairs.
COMMISSION FORMALLY BURIES GREEN CLAIMS RULES
Remember the “CO2-emission free” claim on the side of that (electric) delivery van? It is gone by now, or at least it should be, with the Empowering Consumers Directive finally applied across Europe. EmpCo, as compliance folk like to call it, was to be joined by the Green Claims Directive, a set of rules telling companies how to substantiate, communicate and verify their green claims. But fate decided otherwise: the negotiations have been stuck for more than a year now, and the Commission formally pulled the plug on the initiative when announcing its Work Programme for 2027 this week. The reason? Well, “the file is unlikely to secure support in the Council within a reasonable timeframe” — in other words, national governments are simply not interested in finding an agreement to address green claimwashing. Seventeen other proposals are going to be axed in the next six months, but the Commission does plan 23 new initiatives, ten of which are simplification initiatives. But the ultimate simplification of course is not to propose no rules at all – especially in the last year before the Commission moves into legislative lame duck mode in spring 2028.
MONTENEGRO 2028, ALBANIA 2029, UKRAINE 2030?
EU enlargement is becoming a distant memory again, since Croatia joined in 2013. But the Commission’s annual Enlargement Package published last Wednesday is promising to speed things up. Montenegro, with 21 chapters provisionally closed, should wrap up the rest this year, sign its accession treaty in June 2027 and become the 28th member state in 2028, just in time to make the 28th regime a 29th regime. Provided the reforms keep pace, the country is “on track“, said Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos. Bojan Šarkić, Montenegro’s former EU ambassador, is more enthusiastic: “It’s now or never”. If internal EU politics block a 2028 accession date (hello Marine Le Pen), the whole Western Balkans process could collapse into a “black hole” of foreign interference, he warned. Mixed results for the rest of the class: Albania is still pencilled in for 2029, provided it fixes justice, corruption and organised crime. Ukraine and Moldova get roadmaps but no dates, even if EU leaders have geopolitical reasons to pretend accession talks could be completed by the end of next year. We’re not even talking about Bosnia and North Macedonia. Serbia has not advanced since 2021, though its newly elected Student List “could be a new start for Serbia on the European path”.
I’M GOING TO GO OUT THIS MORNING AND BUY A PEPP
How is your PEPP today? Probably it’s doing nothing — as nobody ever offered to sell you one. The pan-European Personal Pension Product has been around since 2022, and came with a major design flaw: a cap on fees and rules on inducements, which meant that any distributor selling it was actually acting against their own kickbacks. In most Member States, this is not a conflict of interest, it’s a career choice. Earlier this week, Parliament’s ECON committee tried to come to the rescue. Rapporteur Stéphanie Yon-Courtin had a great idea: rename the thing ‘EuroPension‘, to make it a bit catchier, rather than people saying: “well I’m going to go out this morning and buy a PEPP”. But the name, of course, was never the problem. The problem is the national pension products that are often tax-subsidised and more interesting for bank sales staff (better known as “financial advisors”), because they get a nice kickback from every sale, and every year after. But instead of addressing the core conflict of interest, the silver bullet is to remove the fee cap — the PEPP’s unique selling point. The vote is already on 1 December. By then, we’ll at least have a nicer name for the product that nobody buys.