Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT URSULA 2.0 After not so shocking election results, the race for the top EU positions now really begins. Officially, Heads of State will meet for a Summit in Brussels at the end of this month to talk about who will be the next Commission President, Council President, Parliament President, and the High Representative for External Affairs. Unofficially, the same Heads of State will meet already next Monday to discuss these key roles over dinner, with some already holding preliminary talks at the current G7 Summit. While President Ursula von der Leyen’s party (EPP) won this year’s elections and she remains a frontrunner, her fate as a second-term Commission President is not set in stone. Concessions will…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs.   NEXT COMMISSION MANDATE COMES WITH A BIG IMPLEMENTATION QUESTION MARK Ahead of the next mandate, Euractiv invited five experts to talk about lessons to learn from the current action plans for the upcoming 5 years. Despite coming from different backgrounds (industry, Commission, Member State, and CSO), all experts spoke in unison when talking about the biggest lesson to learn, namely the need for a Just Transition with an emphasis on the social aspect. There is no discussion about the need to continue the Green Deal, with participants highlighting the need to preserve legal coherence and legal certainty for the investments that are needed. However, the Green Deal is not likely to continue in its current form, but will instead move…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. EU MINISTERS ENDORSE END OF THE ARTICLE 7 PROCEDURE AGAINST POLAND At the General Affairs Council this week, EU Ministers gave their nod of approval to end the Article 7 procedure against Poland. In 2017, the European Commission presented a reasoned proposal on a clear risk of serious breaches of the rule of law by Poland to the Council, thereby activating the relevant procedure under the EU Treaties. Despite its big, and dangerous sounding name, this Article 7(1) process is in fact a toothless tiger. It was used for the first time for Poland and Hungary, and only calls for a determination of a clear risk of a breach of the rule of law, one of the European values enshrined elsewhere…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. THE LAST EP PLENARY SESSION: FINAL VOTES, GOODBYES, AND FLYING DOVES MEPs gathered for a final time in Strasbourg before the European elections in June, with a record-breaking agenda of 90 final votes. All files where an agreement with Member States was reached in trilogues were approved as planned. MEPs approved the deal on the CSDDD, ending the seemingly never-ending saga of unexpected twists and turns and additional political trilogues. They also endorsed the packaging rules in the PPWR, the AI Act, and rules on ESG Ratings. On initiatives where negotiations with the Council have not started or have not advanced enough, the Parliament closed its position at first reading, including on genomic techniques and plant reproductive material rules. Some initiatives,…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. FORGET ABOUT CMU, HERE IS THE SIU, SAYS ENRICO LETTA A decade after the birth of the Capital Market Union as the ugly twin sister of the Banking Union, it's time to move on and transform the "incomplete” project into a Savings and Investments Union, according to former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta in a report discussed by European leaders this week. The report mentions that private savings total a "staggering" 33 trillion euros and that these are mostly held in currency and deposits. Even worse, 300 billion a year is "diverted" into non-EU investments, mostly American, because the EU can't get its act together and remove fragmentation in markets. For finance and the two other priority sectors (energy and telecoms),…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. PARLIAMENT APPROVES NEW GAS AND HYDROGEN RULES After months of intensive work and almost never-ending trilogues, MEPs this week approved the EU’s new gas and hydrogen legislation with a wide cross-party majority. Beyond replacing our reliance on gas with a potential reliance on hydrogen, it brings a few positive additions including the requirement to draft decommissioning plans. Gas Distribution System Operators (DSOs) together with other stakeholders will need to draft plans on how to decommission unused infrastructure in case of future reduction in gas demand. The prioritisation of hydrogen in hard to decarbonise sectors is another positive aspect of the rules, as well as the establishment of the European Network of Network Operators for Hydrogen (ENNOH), separately from gas operators, to…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. COMMISSION SIGNS ANOTHER MOU TO ENSURE ACCESS TO RAW MATERIALS More electric cars and more technology to facilitate the green and digital transition means more raw materials. In the European Commission’s vocabulary, this all equals more Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with third countries. So far, the EU has signed a dozen MoUs, and more are about to come with the next third country lined up being Australia. Signing MoUs is the Commission’s MO to secure strategic partnerships on critical raw materials needed to turn Europe into a climate neutral continent by 2050, through more solar panels and windmills, electric cars and trucks. The MoUs are a political commitment of no binding legal nature, accompanied by a roadmap developed in cooperation between…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. PARLIAMENT ADOPTS ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF BUILDINGS DIRECTIVE As the final, final, really final Council negotiations on the due diligence rules are taking place today, one would forget that many other agreements that were said to be at risk are actually endorsed without much of a fuss, at least in the Parliament. Along with the Nature Restoration Law a few weeks ago, the Parliament's plenary this week endorsed the final agreement on another key piece of environmental legislation, the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive. The new legislation sets rules for renovation targets of buildings, both on the public and private side. It also introduces a phase-out of fossil fuel heater subsidies as soon as next year, ending another major dependence on…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. COMMISSION PROUD OF ACHIEVEMENTS AS PRESIDENT VON DER LEYEN UP FOR RE-ELECTION One day before the formal confirmation of Ursula von der Leyen as the EPP’s lead candidate for Commission President, the European Commission on Wednesday published “The story of the von der Leyen Commission”, a 56-page document showing how the Commission ensured “Keeping our promise to Europe”. The timing of the paper raises eyebrows, even if a similar document was published together with the incumbent President’s last state of the Union speech last autumn. In fact, the Code of Conduct of Commissioners prevents standing Commissioners to use any human or material resources for electoral campaigns, but here’s the catch: unlike some other Commissioners, von der Leyen is not running for…

Welcome to Better Europe's weekly update on EU Affairs. FINANCE MINISTERS PRESENT THEIR ABC FOR CAPITAL MARKETS IN EUROPE In the coming days, Finance Ministers will be putting their ideas on the table for a refresh of the Commission's Capital Markets Union project. Meeting in Ghent for informal Eurogroup and ECOFIN meetings, it will be hard for ministers to avoid the draft shopping lists that will be finalised later this semester by Enrico Letta to reboot the internal market, and by Mario Draghi on competitiveness. On top of that, bankers are in town for their regular Eurofi school trip, using bilateral meetings with politicians to indirectly influence the EU's financial regulatory agenda for the next mandate. Ministers are expected to promote an "ABC" for capital markets: revise the financial supervision…