Von der Leyen announces “strategic dialogue on the future of Europe’s car industry”
Parliament has approved the second Commission under Ursula von der Leyen with 370 votes in favour, 282 against and 36 abstentions. The result was thus slightly weaker than the election five years ago, when the Commission was elected at the beginning of the first legislative period under von der Leyen with 461 votes in favour, 157 against and 89 abstentions. The entire College of Commissioners will take up their work on 1 December.
Important for the automotive industry: the EU is sticking to its previous plan to decarbonise the transport sector. Both the designated EU Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, and the designated Climate Commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, are in favour of the agreed timetable for ‘phasing out combustion engines’ in the European Union. Accordingly, the CO2 limits are to become successively stricter than before until the de facto ban on new combustion engines comes into force from 2035.
The insistence on the current roadmap not only applies to the target year 2035, but also to the interim CO2 targets for cars in 2025, which Hoekstra also wants to see remain in place. The leading German politicians Robert Habeck and Olaf Scholz, on the other hand, are calling for potential climate penalties to be suspended in 2025 to avoid placing an additional burden on the already hard-pressed manufacturers. Habeck also wants to campaign for the fleet limits to be revised next year instead of in 2026.
However, the designated Climate Commissioner is not in favour of this. According to Hoekstra, the priority is ensuring predictability for the industry. One of the first issues that Hoekstra and Tzitzikostas are now likely to address is the question of whether potential penalties will be enforced in 2025 – or whether the EU will adopt the German position.
In Parliament, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented her team and her programme ahead of today’s election. Among other things, she announced that the Commission’s first initiative would be a competitiveness compass to close Europe’s innovation gap with the USA and China. On the European Green Deal, she said: “We must and we will stay the course on its goals.”
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