The traffic light coalition has repeatedly been criticized for its European policy. Now there is a U-turn in the truest sense of the word. Transport Minister Wissing (FDP) is suddenly saying “no” to the phasing out of internal combustion engines – even though the trilogue has long since been concluded. This is not only unusual but could shake up the entire Fit for 55 package and call Germany’s reliability at the EU level into question, analyzes Lukas Scheid.
However, a step towards clarity has been taken about the Data Privacy Framework (DPF). The agreement for the transfer of data protected by the GDPR to the US has cleared an important hurdle: the European data protection supervisory authorities have expressed surprisingly little criticism of the EU agreement with the USA, observes Falk Steiner.
First, the EU Commission, now the European Parliament: EP employees are no longer allowed to use Tiktok on their work cell phones – MEPs and their assistants are also encouraged to take this step.
On Tuesday, France brought together eleven countries to discuss nuclear power. The goal: to promote the inclusion of nuclear energy in the EU’s renewable energy targets. After the meeting, Poland rushed ahead and demanded EU funding for the construction of new nuclear power plants, writes Manuel Berkel.
Normally, the confirmation of a trilogue result in the Council is a mere formality. But next Tuesday, when the phasing out of internal combustion engines is on the agenda at the Council of Ministers in Brussels, the final vote could become a political issue. This is due to statements made this week by German Transport Minister Volker Wissing and his parliamentary state secretary, Michael Theurer. Passenger cars with combustion engines that can demonstrably be fueled exclusively with e-fuels should also be able to be registered after 2035.
This demand from FDP circles to overturn the ban on internal combustion engines is not new, but it still comes as a surprise at present. The debate has actually long since been concluded. The EU member states – including Germany and the FDP – had already agreed in June last year to allow only carbon-free drives in new passenger cars starting in 2035. The de facto phasing out of internal combustion engines is part of a revision of EU fleet limits, which requires automakers to reduce emissions in their new car fleets.
Under pressure from the FDP ministries, a recital – known as Recital 9a – was negotiated into the bill at the last minute. This calls on the Commission to propose how internal combustion vehicles can still be registered after 2035, provided they run exclusively on carbon-neutral fuels.
Wissing’s statement on Tuesday that the Commission must now deliver and keep its promises refers to that recital. What he does not say is that the 2035 combustion engine phase-out would remain in place anyway because this exemption will only apply to vehicles not covered by the carbon fleet limit regulation.
Recital 9a was still in the legislative proposal after the trilogue with Parliament and Council. Germany had already agreed to this trilogue outcome on Oct. 27, 2022, the German Environment Ministry, which is responsible for the dossier, said Tuesday. “This approval was coordinated with the other ministries.” The text that will now be confirmed in the Council is unchanged, the BMUV said. That means Wissing personally signed off on what he is now trying to prevent.
If the FDP were to continue its blockade and actually overturn the ban on internal combustion vehicles, a coalition dispute would be guaranteed. And what’s more, a blockade by the FDP could have devastating consequences at the EU level. Several EU politicians fear for Germany’s credibility in Brussels. “If you want to push through political positions, then you introduce them early in the legislative process and not afterward,” criticizes Jens Gieseke (CDU), transport policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU group in the EU Parliament.
Fellow party member Markus Ferber (CSU) says Wissings’ statements verge “on schizophrenia.” First, he claimed, he had prevented the combustion engine phase-out in the final meters with a recital. “Now he says Germany cannot agree to the compromise,” Ferber said. Michael Bloss, climate policy spokesman for the Greens in the EU Parliament, commented, “Germany would show itself to be an unreliable negotiating partner if it now backs away from agreements that have been made.”
However, it is also clear that if there is no common position within the coalition, Germany will have to abstain next Tuesday – that is the rule of procedure. At this point, the FDP would definitely have the opportunity to overturn the end of the combustion engine for passenger cars – but not on its own. A qualified majority is required for the proposal to be adopted: If 55 percent of the member states representing at least 65 percent of the EU population vote in favor, the proposal is considered adopted.
Italy has already made it clear that it will not agree to the phasing out of internal combustion engines. The same applies to Poland and Bulgaria, according to diplomatic sources in Brussels. If Berlin also abstains and refuses to give its consent, the qualified majority would no longer be met. There would be a so-called blocking minority and the proposal would be rejected.
This would lead to renegotiations in which Germany would hardly be considered a serious negotiating partner.
Admittedly, it does not have the right to veto. But if the European Data Protection Board had flatly found the US assurances of better protection for data originating in the EU inadequate, that would have been tantamount to a recommendation of rejection for the European Parliament. Moreover, its criticism would likely be the main point of departure for a possible subsequent rejection of the Commission’s adequacy decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). But EU data protection regulators view the Data Privacy Framework as a legal framework more positively than companies feared and critics hoped.
On 54 pages, the supervisory authorities examine the assurances given by the US on administrative procedural changes and the EU Commission’s assessment of these. The Data Protection Committee sees “substantial improvements” over the predecessor agreements Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield, which failed before the European Court of Justice. Admittedly, in their view, there is still room for improvement. But the objections are in no case of such a fundamental nature that Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders would have to wear sackcloth and ashes after this opinion.
The regulators “recognize that the improvements to the US regulatory framework are significant,” says Andrea Jellinek, who chairs the panel. However, she recommends that the Commission’s data protectors “address the concerns raised and provide the clarifications requested to ensure that the adequacy decision will stand.”
Data protection experts are conciliatory in many places: For example, the right to effective legal protection is not necessarily linked to a formal court. It could also be ensured by another form of independent decision-making that follows the same principles. For example, as provided for in the DPF framework as a special jurisdiction under the name Data Protection Review Court. However, the implementation depends on the details, the data protection experts said. The Commission is committed to keeping a constant eye on changes to the review court independence framework for appeals, they said. Changes to US regulations could trigger a directly applicable implementing act that “suspends, revokes, or supplements” the adequacy decision.
The data protection experts are also not keen on a conflict over whether the US authorities would only collect data from private providers to a “necessary and proportionate” extent. They formulate cautiously that, in principle, the possibilities of law enforcement in the US can be considered to respect these principles.
In other areas, however, the data protectors have strong reservations: Above all, the data protectors continue to see problems with the mass storage of data. The requirement that such recordings be approved in advance by an independent body is not considered to be met by the data protectors. In particular, large-scale surveillance measures under the Foreign Surveillance Act FISA Article 702 have repeatedly been the focus of criticism – for example, during the Snowden revelations.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would not be bound by the US guarantees to the changes made by President Joe Biden. However, it would probably not be possible for a corresponding change to be made via presidential executive orders and changes to application regulations, as they are now the basis of the Data Privacy Framework. Substantive legislative changes to security law in the US by the US legislature, on the other hand, have appeared politically impossible for years.
However, the data protectionists also have concerns about the possible transfer to third countries of intelligence obtained under the DPF by US security authorities: here, they are calling on the EU Commission to provide further information.
In the opinion of the data protection experts, the US authorities and thus the EU Commission should really improve how automated decisions based on data are addressed as sector-specific regulations in the US – the data protection committee is dissatisfied here.
The EU Commission can thus sit back and relax, as can the negotiating bodies on the US side, such as the Department of Commerce. The now-published opinion of the EDPB seems to have cleared a particularly relevant legal and political hurdle – the era of unprotected data transfers to the USA could be over soon.
However, the opinion of the Data Protection Committee suffers from a crucial flaw: EU data protection officials must rely in large part on publicly available reports from US agencies and political assurances – the implementation of which they cannot verify because they lack the authority to do so.
The ZVEI fears that Europe will miss its expansion targets in the semiconductor market if the EU does not act faster and mobilize more money. It said Europe is in danger of being left behind, in part because the effects of the EU Chips Act are arriving too late. “It is a fact that Europe will not be able to maintain itself as a semiconductor region if the necessary framework conditions for investment in Europe are not installed immediately,” Wolfgang Weber, Chairman of the ZVEI board of directors, said Tuesday during an outlook on trends and opportunities in the semiconductor market.
The EU presented the Chips Act in February 2022. The aim is to double Europe’s share of the global semiconductor market from currently less than ten percent to 20 percent by 2030. This is intended to contribute to Europe’s technological sovereignty. In November 2022, the Council, and, on February 15, 2023, the EU Parliament cleared the way for the trilogue.
The problem: Even if the global semiconductor market is currently showing typical cyclical behavior, the chip rally of recent years is not yet over, the ZVEI is convinced. Since the global semiconductor market will double to about one trillion US dollars by 2030, Europe must quadruple its share to reach the targeted market share.
The EU’s estimated financial allocation (43 billion euros) is too low, Weber said, especially in comparison with the support programs of the United States (about 270 billion US dollars). He said the Commission relies almost exclusively on support from member states. “Without significant additional investment from the public side and without investment incentives for the private side, there will be a further weakening of Europe as a production location despite the Chips Act.”
He said it was crucial to promote investment in areas where Europe was strong and would continue to have a great need in the future: the (automotive) industry and the green transformation. Weber emphasized that the Chips Act is a strategic instrument and not an instrument of crisis.
He said the EU should focus on the strategic issues in the three pillars of the Chips Act. It is also essential to improve the framework conditions, he said. To this end, the EU must strengthen the ecosystem by spending more on research and development, stabilizing energy costs for the energy-intensive semiconductor industry, and counteract the shortage of skilled workers. vis
Switching sides from business to politics is a rare occurrence in Germany. One of the few representatives is State Secretary Udo Philipp, responsible for the industry at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). He is thus one of the political officials accompanying the transformation of the economy toward climate neutrality but is also involved with trade policy issues or the Supply Chain Act.
Philip is well informed about business and transformation, both personally and professionally: for more than a decade, he was a senior partner at Swedish financial investor EQT, where he was responsible, among other things, for the purchase and sell-back of Daimler subsidiary MTU Friedrichshafen, which earned the investor about two billion euros. But in 2015, he backed out and started writing a new chapter in his life, six years after the global financial crisis made him undergo what he calls his “key experience.”
At the time, some of EQT’s companies were also facing an “existence-threatening crisis,” so the investor as owner deferred or abate their debts, he writes on his website. According to the rules of the market economy, they would have lost money in the process. The financial manager was could not understand how the federal government “let itself be bamboozled by the banks” at the time. That’s when it became clear to him that he wanted to change something politically.
He first switched to part-time, later quit altogether, sold his shares, and studied for a year at Harvard Kennedy School, where he got a master’s degree in public administration. And he got involved in civil society as a member of Finance Watch, an NGO founded at the instigation of EU parliamentarians from various parties in Brussels – as a counterweight to the financial lobby. Sven Giegold, then a member of the European Parliament for the Greens and now his state secretary colleague in the BMWK, also played a central role.
He established contact with Gerhard Schick, then financial policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bundestag, who was also appalled by the political reaction to the financial crisis. When the latter founded the NGO Bürgerbewegung Finanzwende in 2018 and went from politician to activist, Udo Philipp supported the project financially, in terms of content and organization as chairman of the supervisory board.
All three of them – Schick, Giegold, and Philipp – even wrote a book together in 2016: “Finanzwende: den nächsten Crash verhindern” (“Financial turnaround: preventing the next crash”). It was a sobering review of the failure to reform the financial system. 34,019 pages of new regulations had been created since the financial crisis of 2007/8, but this flood of paper had achieved little; the next crash was sure to come, according to the tenor of the book.
After his Harvard studies, Udo Philipp first managed the family household for a while, mainly cooking. At that time, his wife worked full time, and he was a part-time member of the supervisory board, among other things, at Europe’s largest sustainability bank, the Dutch Triodos. After his two sons graduated, he returned to work full-time.
Starting in 2019, he initially worked under the Green Minister of Finance Monika Heinold in Schleswig-Holstein as State Secretary for Tax and Finance Administration, moving from his Bavarian home to Kiel. When Heinold’s cabinet colleague Robert Habeck took over the renamed BMWK ministry in the traffic light government, he brought Philipp to Berlin as one of his seven state secretaries. This gave him an important position regarding shaping the economy.
In the BMWK, he also coordinates the ministry’s position on the EU supply chain directive. In this context, he notes that the organized lobby of German business is “up in arms” against it, he said recently at a symposium in Berlin. He said it is questionable whether this is being done on principle because it is something new. And then he spoke of a conversation with a leading technology group manager from the DAX at the beginning of the energy crisis. He wanted to know what would happen if platinum were sanctioned.
The manager was unable to give him an ad hoc answer but said that a working group with top people would first have to work on this for two to three months. Philipp thought that if someone didn’t know what was going on in his supply chains, he would not only have a problem with the environment and human rights but also with economic sustainability.
When it comes to the stability of supply chains, including those important for the transformation, he thus believes that rethinking the economy is necessary. Anyone who buys copper on the stock market risks seeing prices triple tomorrow. It is important, he says, “to make long-term contracts with suppliers that you look at thoroughly.” Caspar Dohmen
The traffic light coalition has repeatedly been criticized for its European policy. Now there is a U-turn in the truest sense of the word. Transport Minister Wissing (FDP) is suddenly saying “no” to the phasing out of internal combustion engines – even though the trilogue has long since been concluded. This is not only unusual but could shake up the entire Fit for 55 package and call Germany’s reliability at the EU level into question, analyzes Lukas Scheid.
However, a step towards clarity has been taken about the Data Privacy Framework (DPF). The agreement for the transfer of data protected by the GDPR to the US has cleared an important hurdle: the European data protection supervisory authorities have expressed surprisingly little criticism of the EU agreement with the USA, observes Falk Steiner.
First, the EU Commission, now the European Parliament: EP employees are no longer allowed to use Tiktok on their work cell phones – MEPs and their assistants are also encouraged to take this step.
On Tuesday, France brought together eleven countries to discuss nuclear power. The goal: to promote the inclusion of nuclear energy in the EU’s renewable energy targets. After the meeting, Poland rushed ahead and demanded EU funding for the construction of new nuclear power plants, writes Manuel Berkel.
Normally, the confirmation of a trilogue result in the Council is a mere formality. But next Tuesday, when the phasing out of internal combustion engines is on the agenda at the Council of Ministers in Brussels, the final vote could become a political issue. This is due to statements made this week by German Transport Minister Volker Wissing and his parliamentary state secretary, Michael Theurer. Passenger cars with combustion engines that can demonstrably be fueled exclusively with e-fuels should also be able to be registered after 2035.
This demand from FDP circles to overturn the ban on internal combustion engines is not new, but it still comes as a surprise at present. The debate has actually long since been concluded. The EU member states – including Germany and the FDP – had already agreed in June last year to allow only carbon-free drives in new passenger cars starting in 2035. The de facto phasing out of internal combustion engines is part of a revision of EU fleet limits, which requires automakers to reduce emissions in their new car fleets.
Under pressure from the FDP ministries, a recital – known as Recital 9a – was negotiated into the bill at the last minute. This calls on the Commission to propose how internal combustion vehicles can still be registered after 2035, provided they run exclusively on carbon-neutral fuels.
Wissing’s statement on Tuesday that the Commission must now deliver and keep its promises refers to that recital. What he does not say is that the 2035 combustion engine phase-out would remain in place anyway because this exemption will only apply to vehicles not covered by the carbon fleet limit regulation.
Recital 9a was still in the legislative proposal after the trilogue with Parliament and Council. Germany had already agreed to this trilogue outcome on Oct. 27, 2022, the German Environment Ministry, which is responsible for the dossier, said Tuesday. “This approval was coordinated with the other ministries.” The text that will now be confirmed in the Council is unchanged, the BMUV said. That means Wissing personally signed off on what he is now trying to prevent.
If the FDP were to continue its blockade and actually overturn the ban on internal combustion vehicles, a coalition dispute would be guaranteed. And what’s more, a blockade by the FDP could have devastating consequences at the EU level. Several EU politicians fear for Germany’s credibility in Brussels. “If you want to push through political positions, then you introduce them early in the legislative process and not afterward,” criticizes Jens Gieseke (CDU), transport policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU group in the EU Parliament.
Fellow party member Markus Ferber (CSU) says Wissings’ statements verge “on schizophrenia.” First, he claimed, he had prevented the combustion engine phase-out in the final meters with a recital. “Now he says Germany cannot agree to the compromise,” Ferber said. Michael Bloss, climate policy spokesman for the Greens in the EU Parliament, commented, “Germany would show itself to be an unreliable negotiating partner if it now backs away from agreements that have been made.”
However, it is also clear that if there is no common position within the coalition, Germany will have to abstain next Tuesday – that is the rule of procedure. At this point, the FDP would definitely have the opportunity to overturn the end of the combustion engine for passenger cars – but not on its own. A qualified majority is required for the proposal to be adopted: If 55 percent of the member states representing at least 65 percent of the EU population vote in favor, the proposal is considered adopted.
Italy has already made it clear that it will not agree to the phasing out of internal combustion engines. The same applies to Poland and Bulgaria, according to diplomatic sources in Brussels. If Berlin also abstains and refuses to give its consent, the qualified majority would no longer be met. There would be a so-called blocking minority and the proposal would be rejected.
This would lead to renegotiations in which Germany would hardly be considered a serious negotiating partner.
Admittedly, it does not have the right to veto. But if the European Data Protection Board had flatly found the US assurances of better protection for data originating in the EU inadequate, that would have been tantamount to a recommendation of rejection for the European Parliament. Moreover, its criticism would likely be the main point of departure for a possible subsequent rejection of the Commission’s adequacy decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). But EU data protection regulators view the Data Privacy Framework as a legal framework more positively than companies feared and critics hoped.
On 54 pages, the supervisory authorities examine the assurances given by the US on administrative procedural changes and the EU Commission’s assessment of these. The Data Protection Committee sees “substantial improvements” over the predecessor agreements Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield, which failed before the European Court of Justice. Admittedly, in their view, there is still room for improvement. But the objections are in no case of such a fundamental nature that Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders would have to wear sackcloth and ashes after this opinion.
The regulators “recognize that the improvements to the US regulatory framework are significant,” says Andrea Jellinek, who chairs the panel. However, she recommends that the Commission’s data protectors “address the concerns raised and provide the clarifications requested to ensure that the adequacy decision will stand.”
Data protection experts are conciliatory in many places: For example, the right to effective legal protection is not necessarily linked to a formal court. It could also be ensured by another form of independent decision-making that follows the same principles. For example, as provided for in the DPF framework as a special jurisdiction under the name Data Protection Review Court. However, the implementation depends on the details, the data protection experts said. The Commission is committed to keeping a constant eye on changes to the review court independence framework for appeals, they said. Changes to US regulations could trigger a directly applicable implementing act that “suspends, revokes, or supplements” the adequacy decision.
The data protection experts are also not keen on a conflict over whether the US authorities would only collect data from private providers to a “necessary and proportionate” extent. They formulate cautiously that, in principle, the possibilities of law enforcement in the US can be considered to respect these principles.
In other areas, however, the data protectors have strong reservations: Above all, the data protectors continue to see problems with the mass storage of data. The requirement that such recordings be approved in advance by an independent body is not considered to be met by the data protectors. In particular, large-scale surveillance measures under the Foreign Surveillance Act FISA Article 702 have repeatedly been the focus of criticism – for example, during the Snowden revelations.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would not be bound by the US guarantees to the changes made by President Joe Biden. However, it would probably not be possible for a corresponding change to be made via presidential executive orders and changes to application regulations, as they are now the basis of the Data Privacy Framework. Substantive legislative changes to security law in the US by the US legislature, on the other hand, have appeared politically impossible for years.
However, the data protectionists also have concerns about the possible transfer to third countries of intelligence obtained under the DPF by US security authorities: here, they are calling on the EU Commission to provide further information.
In the opinion of the data protection experts, the US authorities and thus the EU Commission should really improve how automated decisions based on data are addressed as sector-specific regulations in the US – the data protection committee is dissatisfied here.
The EU Commission can thus sit back and relax, as can the negotiating bodies on the US side, such as the Department of Commerce. The now-published opinion of the EDPB seems to have cleared a particularly relevant legal and political hurdle – the era of unprotected data transfers to the USA could be over soon.
However, the opinion of the Data Protection Committee suffers from a crucial flaw: EU data protection officials must rely in large part on publicly available reports from US agencies and political assurances – the implementation of which they cannot verify because they lack the authority to do so.
The ZVEI fears that Europe will miss its expansion targets in the semiconductor market if the EU does not act faster and mobilize more money. It said Europe is in danger of being left behind, in part because the effects of the EU Chips Act are arriving too late. “It is a fact that Europe will not be able to maintain itself as a semiconductor region if the necessary framework conditions for investment in Europe are not installed immediately,” Wolfgang Weber, Chairman of the ZVEI board of directors, said Tuesday during an outlook on trends and opportunities in the semiconductor market.
The EU presented the Chips Act in February 2022. The aim is to double Europe’s share of the global semiconductor market from currently less than ten percent to 20 percent by 2030. This is intended to contribute to Europe’s technological sovereignty. In November 2022, the Council, and, on February 15, 2023, the EU Parliament cleared the way for the trilogue.
The problem: Even if the global semiconductor market is currently showing typical cyclical behavior, the chip rally of recent years is not yet over, the ZVEI is convinced. Since the global semiconductor market will double to about one trillion US dollars by 2030, Europe must quadruple its share to reach the targeted market share.
The EU’s estimated financial allocation (43 billion euros) is too low, Weber said, especially in comparison with the support programs of the United States (about 270 billion US dollars). He said the Commission relies almost exclusively on support from member states. “Without significant additional investment from the public side and without investment incentives for the private side, there will be a further weakening of Europe as a production location despite the Chips Act.”
He said it was crucial to promote investment in areas where Europe was strong and would continue to have a great need in the future: the (automotive) industry and the green transformation. Weber emphasized that the Chips Act is a strategic instrument and not an instrument of crisis.
He said the EU should focus on the strategic issues in the three pillars of the Chips Act. It is also essential to improve the framework conditions, he said. To this end, the EU must strengthen the ecosystem by spending more on research and development, stabilizing energy costs for the energy-intensive semiconductor industry, and counteract the shortage of skilled workers. vis
Switching sides from business to politics is a rare occurrence in Germany. One of the few representatives is State Secretary Udo Philipp, responsible for the industry at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK). He is thus one of the political officials accompanying the transformation of the economy toward climate neutrality but is also involved with trade policy issues or the Supply Chain Act.
Philip is well informed about business and transformation, both personally and professionally: for more than a decade, he was a senior partner at Swedish financial investor EQT, where he was responsible, among other things, for the purchase and sell-back of Daimler subsidiary MTU Friedrichshafen, which earned the investor about two billion euros. But in 2015, he backed out and started writing a new chapter in his life, six years after the global financial crisis made him undergo what he calls his “key experience.”
At the time, some of EQT’s companies were also facing an “existence-threatening crisis,” so the investor as owner deferred or abate their debts, he writes on his website. According to the rules of the market economy, they would have lost money in the process. The financial manager was could not understand how the federal government “let itself be bamboozled by the banks” at the time. That’s when it became clear to him that he wanted to change something politically.
He first switched to part-time, later quit altogether, sold his shares, and studied for a year at Harvard Kennedy School, where he got a master’s degree in public administration. And he got involved in civil society as a member of Finance Watch, an NGO founded at the instigation of EU parliamentarians from various parties in Brussels – as a counterweight to the financial lobby. Sven Giegold, then a member of the European Parliament for the Greens and now his state secretary colleague in the BMWK, also played a central role.
He established contact with Gerhard Schick, then financial policy spokesman for the Greens in the Bundestag, who was also appalled by the political reaction to the financial crisis. When the latter founded the NGO Bürgerbewegung Finanzwende in 2018 and went from politician to activist, Udo Philipp supported the project financially, in terms of content and organization as chairman of the supervisory board.
All three of them – Schick, Giegold, and Philipp – even wrote a book together in 2016: “Finanzwende: den nächsten Crash verhindern” (“Financial turnaround: preventing the next crash”). It was a sobering review of the failure to reform the financial system. 34,019 pages of new regulations had been created since the financial crisis of 2007/8, but this flood of paper had achieved little; the next crash was sure to come, according to the tenor of the book.
After his Harvard studies, Udo Philipp first managed the family household for a while, mainly cooking. At that time, his wife worked full time, and he was a part-time member of the supervisory board, among other things, at Europe’s largest sustainability bank, the Dutch Triodos. After his two sons graduated, he returned to work full-time.
Starting in 2019, he initially worked under the Green Minister of Finance Monika Heinold in Schleswig-Holstein as State Secretary for Tax and Finance Administration, moving from his Bavarian home to Kiel. When Heinold’s cabinet colleague Robert Habeck took over the renamed BMWK ministry in the traffic light government, he brought Philipp to Berlin as one of his seven state secretaries. This gave him an important position regarding shaping the economy.
In the BMWK, he also coordinates the ministry’s position on the EU supply chain directive. In this context, he notes that the organized lobby of German business is “up in arms” against it, he said recently at a symposium in Berlin. He said it is questionable whether this is being done on principle because it is something new. And then he spoke of a conversation with a leading technology group manager from the DAX at the beginning of the energy crisis. He wanted to know what would happen if platinum were sanctioned.
The manager was unable to give him an ad hoc answer but said that a working group with top people would first have to work on this for two to three months. Philipp thought that if someone didn’t know what was going on in his supply chains, he would not only have a problem with the environment and human rights but also with economic sustainability.
When it comes to the stability of supply chains, including those important for the transformation, he thus believes that rethinking the economy is necessary. Anyone who buys copper on the stock market risks seeing prices triple tomorrow. It is important, he says, “to make long-term contracts with suppliers that you look at thoroughly.” Caspar Dohmen
