Brussels is slowly waking up from its summer slumber! Political activity in the EU institutions is picking up again this week. It is still more than two weeks until Ursula von der Leyen’s “State of the EU” speech, which marks the political start after the parliamentary summer break. But the first committee meetings and trilogue rounds are already taking place this week.
On Wednesday, the Parliament and the Council will negotiate the Ecodesign Regulation in the trilogue. This issue of the News will bring you up to date on this. On Thursday, the trilogue on the Buildings Directive will take place.
Also on Wednesday, the Agriculture Committee votes on its opinion on the certification of carbon withdrawals and exchanges views with the European Food Safety Authority on plant protection products and the risk assessment on glyphosate.
The Budget Committee will vote Wednesday on the 2023 budget transfer requests and discuss an opinion on the role of tax policy in times of crisis. The Economic Affairs Committee will consider the amendments to the 2024 general budget.
And it may be decided this week whether Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra will succeed Frans Timmermans as Climate Commissioner. In this issue, you will find a Feature on the criticism of this nomination, which also explains the procedure of the appointment.
Have a great start to the week and welcome back!
On Friday, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte officially proposed Wopke Hoekstra as EU Commissioner of the Netherlands. The former foreign minister is to succeed Frans Timmermans, who is the leading candidate of an alliance of Social Democrats and Greens in the early parliamentary election on Nov. 22. However, there is a problem with Rute’s succession plan: Christian Democrat Hoekstra belongs to a different party family than Social Democrat Timmermans.
The Social Democrats in the EU Parliament are thus calling for someone from their ranks to succeed Timmermans. Especially since Hoekstra could possibly also take over the international climate policy portfolio from his predecessor. “It is pivotal for our group that the climate portfolio remains in the hands of the S&D family,” the S&D group tweeted. And predicted: Hoekstra can expect a tough hearing in the EU Parliament.
According to the procedure, Hoekstra will first appear before Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday. There, his qualifications and possible scope of duties will be discussed. Afterward, the EU Parliament must approve the nominee after questioning him in the relevant specialist committee. The MEPs can also reject the candidate in the secret ballot.
If the parliamentarians actually vote against the 47-year-old, Rutte would have to nominate a new candidate. If he chooses a Social Democrat, the EPP would possibly forge a majority against her. Rutte himself is a liberal.
Hoekstra has not yet attracted attention as a climate politician. But as Foreign Minister and Finance Minister in the Netherlands, he brings experience that he could bring to the international climate negotiations, which will focus heavily on climate finance. His main task as Commissioner in the coming months is likely to be representing the EU at the negotiating table at the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai (COP28). This is because new legislative initiatives can hardly be expected from the Commission in this area. The designated Executive Vice President Maroš Šefčovič is to coordinate the remaining activities in the Green Deal.
The division of responsibilities is causing criticism among climate politicians. Dutch Green MEP Bas Eickhout acknowledged Hoekstra’s nomination with a cynical “Well….” Hoekstra does not have enough time to make a substantial difference, comments Dutch Volt politician Sophie in ‘t Veld. She suggests Timmermans’ Cabinet Chief Diederik Samsom as his successor. He could “seamlessly take over the climate agenda.”
In energy policy, work starts after the summer break with the nuclear issue – no, not with the fundamental dispute between France and Germany for a change. Rather, Franc Bogovič (EPP) from Slovenia will soon present his draft for the Parliament’s own initiative report on small modular reactors (SMRs). The following few years will show whether this will lead to a new flourishing of nuclear energy in Europe, as in the dreams of some Silicon Valley gurus.
The first important trilogue is already on the agenda for Thursday when the building directive will be negotiated. Germany has scaled back its ambitions more and more in recent months. Many observers no longer expect minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) to be introduced for individual buildings that waste particularly large amounts of energy, as the Commission and Parliament want.
In the spring, Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) floated the idea that the MEPS should apply to the average of entire neighborhoods. But this leaves Germany out on a limb in the Council, says a source familiar with the negotiations. The Council’s general approach applies to the average of the entire national building stock.
The last steps for the electricity market reform are about to be taken before the trilogue. On September 7, the ITRE will decide on the position regarding the REMIT transparency directive. In the second week of September, the plenum will then vote on the overall amendment to the Electricity Market Regulation and the Electricity Market Directive. The Industry Committee had already adopted the positions on the latter two shortly before the summer break.
ID or EKR may delay the vote in plenary until the following session week. However, the ultimately decisive majority of EPP, S&D, Renew and Greens stands. There is no official agenda for the first meeting of the Permanent Representatives (Coreper) after the summer break. However, the Spanish Council Presidency wants to conclude the dossier by the end of the year.
It will also be interesting to see whether and how the German debate on the industrial electricity price will be interwoven with the Brussels discourse. At the very least, the various proposals for a subsidized “bridge electricity price” through to the mass expansion of renewables are likely not just to be relevant to state aid but also to provide political fuel in the Council. Which government is trying to support its industry with subsidies is observed suspiciously.
The think tank Epico, for example, wants to focus on the European dimension in the coming weeks, says its director Bernd Weber. Behind this, however, are more fundamental debates, states the energy expert. “The first exciting question is where to allow changes to take place by market means or to counteract them for reasons of resilience,” Weber says. And the second dimension is the role of the market and the state and their interaction.
For the Epico founder, the Net-Zero Industry Act can only be the beginning. “Europe needs a holistic industrial strategy. Large parts of value creation and also decarbonization are not yet covered by the Commission’s proposal.”
Highly relevant to decarbonization is the gas market package. The trilogue is high on the list of priorities for the German government because the development of an urgently needed hydrogen network is also linked to this piece of legislation. However, the Council presidency will probably not tackle it as ambitiously as the electricity market reform. He still hopes for an agreement by the end of the year, said rapporteur Jens Geier (SPD) shortly before the summer break. It will probably not be clear until October.
One of the issues still in dispute is network planning. In the case of different regulations for transmission and distribution system operators (DSOs), the Council is said to have recently moved in the direction of the Parliament. The Parliament does not want to regulate the small DSOs as harshly as the supraregional grid companies. Ways to prioritize hydrogen for the industry seem to be more feasible, as Geier is seeking.
The energy ministers will meet again on December 19 in Brussels. Until then, no further meeting is currently planned, the Council Presidency confirmed on Friday upon request. However, Spain has scheduled a whole series of congresses and expert rounds:
According to information from Table.Media, the high-level conference on the expansion of the power grids, which the Directorate-General for Energy announced in June, will take place on September 7. Now that the course for a faster expansion of renewables has recently been set, the focus is once again shifting to grid expansion.
The Commission’s action plan on heat pumps is also still in preparation. The last opportunity for detailed comments will be on October 9 at the fourth Stakeholder Forum. Also still largely in the conceptual phase is the topic of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). The Commission is planning a forum on this in Denmark on November 27-28.
From think tanker, to policymaker and back again: Abigaël Vasselier has joined the European think tank focusing on China, MERICS, as research director and head of the foreign relations team a few weeks ago. In her new position, the Frenchwoman will focus on China’s foreign policy, with a particular focus on the EU’s policy on China. As former deputy head of the division for China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Mongolia at the European External Action Service (EEAS), she has been actively involved in shaping this until very recently. Prior to that, Vasselier had her first think tank job at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
Abigaël sees this “revolving door” principle of swapping from administration to think-tank as very valuable for her work and important for policy-making as well as think-tanking. She explained that “once you’ve worked in the administration itself, you formulate policy recommendations differently than you did before.” Having “been involved in the system yourself,” she says, gives you a better appreciation of what can be expected from an apparatus like the sprawling yet detailed EU administration, the political cost attached to actions, what is needed, and what can realistically be done. “You know much better at what level debates need to be held and which stakeholders and actors need to be brought together.”
After five years at EEAS, she felt the need to go back into a space that would allow more time to reflect and space for new ideas. As an official working in an administration, this is sometimes restricted. In her opinion, there is a lot of potentials for more people to benefit from these revolving doors and explore the other aspects of the work: “That would help European policy-makers to think more ‘out of the box,’ to have new ideas, and to be more proactive. That also applies to the China issue.” Thanks to her time as a European diplomat at EEAS, she is now approaching her contribution to MERICS work on China differently than before.
That she would one day work in the think tank world with a focus on China and Asia was not a given when she started learning Mandarin. Born in 1989, Abigaël grew up in Fos-sur-Mer, the city hosting the Port of Marseille in southern France. At her lycée in Istres, there was the option to learn a third foreign language: Chinese. “I would have preferred to learn Arabic because that’s what all my friends spoke, but there was no choice. That’s how it became Mandarin,” and the journey started. This was when she visited China for the first time on a class trip to Beijing.
Like her start in Mandarin, the rest of the journey was a series of coincidences. For her studies in international relations at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, she had to choose between Spanish or Mandarin again. To deepen her language skills, she spent a year at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing during her studies. She finished her studies with fulfilling her dream of studying at a British university with a master’s degree in Asian Studies at SOAS in London.
There is one aspect of her work that she remains committed to throughout the years: Europe. While her path toward becoming a China expert was a series of coincidences, her commitment to Europe has been a priority from the beginning of her career. She explained that “the realization that China can’t just be looked at from a national perspective came pretty early on.” After her master’s degree, her work already took on a European focus: In the pan-European think tank ECFR, Abigaël worked closely with François Godement, a renowned French sinologist to establish an Asia program. Francois Godement became her mentor, and together they published the book “China at the gates: a new power audit of EU-China relations.”
The agenda for her new position is already filled: Among other things, it includes looking at EU engagement with China, notably in view of the high-level dialogues and possibly the upcoming EU-China summit. In her work at MERICS and as a true European, she says it is important for her to bring the French touch. “The Franco-German engine is important for Europe, notably vis-a-vis China.” After Brussels, Berlin will now be her new home. She is not a complete foreigner to Germany. She is married to a German, after all. Amelie Richter
Brussels is slowly waking up from its summer slumber! Political activity in the EU institutions is picking up again this week. It is still more than two weeks until Ursula von der Leyen’s “State of the EU” speech, which marks the political start after the parliamentary summer break. But the first committee meetings and trilogue rounds are already taking place this week.
On Wednesday, the Parliament and the Council will negotiate the Ecodesign Regulation in the trilogue. This issue of the News will bring you up to date on this. On Thursday, the trilogue on the Buildings Directive will take place.
Also on Wednesday, the Agriculture Committee votes on its opinion on the certification of carbon withdrawals and exchanges views with the European Food Safety Authority on plant protection products and the risk assessment on glyphosate.
The Budget Committee will vote Wednesday on the 2023 budget transfer requests and discuss an opinion on the role of tax policy in times of crisis. The Economic Affairs Committee will consider the amendments to the 2024 general budget.
And it may be decided this week whether Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra will succeed Frans Timmermans as Climate Commissioner. In this issue, you will find a Feature on the criticism of this nomination, which also explains the procedure of the appointment.
Have a great start to the week and welcome back!
On Friday, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte officially proposed Wopke Hoekstra as EU Commissioner of the Netherlands. The former foreign minister is to succeed Frans Timmermans, who is the leading candidate of an alliance of Social Democrats and Greens in the early parliamentary election on Nov. 22. However, there is a problem with Rute’s succession plan: Christian Democrat Hoekstra belongs to a different party family than Social Democrat Timmermans.
The Social Democrats in the EU Parliament are thus calling for someone from their ranks to succeed Timmermans. Especially since Hoekstra could possibly also take over the international climate policy portfolio from his predecessor. “It is pivotal for our group that the climate portfolio remains in the hands of the S&D family,” the S&D group tweeted. And predicted: Hoekstra can expect a tough hearing in the EU Parliament.
According to the procedure, Hoekstra will first appear before Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday. There, his qualifications and possible scope of duties will be discussed. Afterward, the EU Parliament must approve the nominee after questioning him in the relevant specialist committee. The MEPs can also reject the candidate in the secret ballot.
If the parliamentarians actually vote against the 47-year-old, Rutte would have to nominate a new candidate. If he chooses a Social Democrat, the EPP would possibly forge a majority against her. Rutte himself is a liberal.
Hoekstra has not yet attracted attention as a climate politician. But as Foreign Minister and Finance Minister in the Netherlands, he brings experience that he could bring to the international climate negotiations, which will focus heavily on climate finance. His main task as Commissioner in the coming months is likely to be representing the EU at the negotiating table at the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai (COP28). This is because new legislative initiatives can hardly be expected from the Commission in this area. The designated Executive Vice President Maroš Šefčovič is to coordinate the remaining activities in the Green Deal.
The division of responsibilities is causing criticism among climate politicians. Dutch Green MEP Bas Eickhout acknowledged Hoekstra’s nomination with a cynical “Well….” Hoekstra does not have enough time to make a substantial difference, comments Dutch Volt politician Sophie in ‘t Veld. She suggests Timmermans’ Cabinet Chief Diederik Samsom as his successor. He could “seamlessly take over the climate agenda.”
In energy policy, work starts after the summer break with the nuclear issue – no, not with the fundamental dispute between France and Germany for a change. Rather, Franc Bogovič (EPP) from Slovenia will soon present his draft for the Parliament’s own initiative report on small modular reactors (SMRs). The following few years will show whether this will lead to a new flourishing of nuclear energy in Europe, as in the dreams of some Silicon Valley gurus.
The first important trilogue is already on the agenda for Thursday when the building directive will be negotiated. Germany has scaled back its ambitions more and more in recent months. Many observers no longer expect minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) to be introduced for individual buildings that waste particularly large amounts of energy, as the Commission and Parliament want.
In the spring, Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) floated the idea that the MEPS should apply to the average of entire neighborhoods. But this leaves Germany out on a limb in the Council, says a source familiar with the negotiations. The Council’s general approach applies to the average of the entire national building stock.
The last steps for the electricity market reform are about to be taken before the trilogue. On September 7, the ITRE will decide on the position regarding the REMIT transparency directive. In the second week of September, the plenum will then vote on the overall amendment to the Electricity Market Regulation and the Electricity Market Directive. The Industry Committee had already adopted the positions on the latter two shortly before the summer break.
ID or EKR may delay the vote in plenary until the following session week. However, the ultimately decisive majority of EPP, S&D, Renew and Greens stands. There is no official agenda for the first meeting of the Permanent Representatives (Coreper) after the summer break. However, the Spanish Council Presidency wants to conclude the dossier by the end of the year.
It will also be interesting to see whether and how the German debate on the industrial electricity price will be interwoven with the Brussels discourse. At the very least, the various proposals for a subsidized “bridge electricity price” through to the mass expansion of renewables are likely not just to be relevant to state aid but also to provide political fuel in the Council. Which government is trying to support its industry with subsidies is observed suspiciously.
The think tank Epico, for example, wants to focus on the European dimension in the coming weeks, says its director Bernd Weber. Behind this, however, are more fundamental debates, states the energy expert. “The first exciting question is where to allow changes to take place by market means or to counteract them for reasons of resilience,” Weber says. And the second dimension is the role of the market and the state and their interaction.
For the Epico founder, the Net-Zero Industry Act can only be the beginning. “Europe needs a holistic industrial strategy. Large parts of value creation and also decarbonization are not yet covered by the Commission’s proposal.”
Highly relevant to decarbonization is the gas market package. The trilogue is high on the list of priorities for the German government because the development of an urgently needed hydrogen network is also linked to this piece of legislation. However, the Council presidency will probably not tackle it as ambitiously as the electricity market reform. He still hopes for an agreement by the end of the year, said rapporteur Jens Geier (SPD) shortly before the summer break. It will probably not be clear until October.
One of the issues still in dispute is network planning. In the case of different regulations for transmission and distribution system operators (DSOs), the Council is said to have recently moved in the direction of the Parliament. The Parliament does not want to regulate the small DSOs as harshly as the supraregional grid companies. Ways to prioritize hydrogen for the industry seem to be more feasible, as Geier is seeking.
The energy ministers will meet again on December 19 in Brussels. Until then, no further meeting is currently planned, the Council Presidency confirmed on Friday upon request. However, Spain has scheduled a whole series of congresses and expert rounds:
According to information from Table.Media, the high-level conference on the expansion of the power grids, which the Directorate-General for Energy announced in June, will take place on September 7. Now that the course for a faster expansion of renewables has recently been set, the focus is once again shifting to grid expansion.
The Commission’s action plan on heat pumps is also still in preparation. The last opportunity for detailed comments will be on October 9 at the fourth Stakeholder Forum. Also still largely in the conceptual phase is the topic of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). The Commission is planning a forum on this in Denmark on November 27-28.
From think tanker, to policymaker and back again: Abigaël Vasselier has joined the European think tank focusing on China, MERICS, as research director and head of the foreign relations team a few weeks ago. In her new position, the Frenchwoman will focus on China’s foreign policy, with a particular focus on the EU’s policy on China. As former deputy head of the division for China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Mongolia at the European External Action Service (EEAS), she has been actively involved in shaping this until very recently. Prior to that, Vasselier had her first think tank job at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
Abigaël sees this “revolving door” principle of swapping from administration to think-tank as very valuable for her work and important for policy-making as well as think-tanking. She explained that “once you’ve worked in the administration itself, you formulate policy recommendations differently than you did before.” Having “been involved in the system yourself,” she says, gives you a better appreciation of what can be expected from an apparatus like the sprawling yet detailed EU administration, the political cost attached to actions, what is needed, and what can realistically be done. “You know much better at what level debates need to be held and which stakeholders and actors need to be brought together.”
After five years at EEAS, she felt the need to go back into a space that would allow more time to reflect and space for new ideas. As an official working in an administration, this is sometimes restricted. In her opinion, there is a lot of potentials for more people to benefit from these revolving doors and explore the other aspects of the work: “That would help European policy-makers to think more ‘out of the box,’ to have new ideas, and to be more proactive. That also applies to the China issue.” Thanks to her time as a European diplomat at EEAS, she is now approaching her contribution to MERICS work on China differently than before.
That she would one day work in the think tank world with a focus on China and Asia was not a given when she started learning Mandarin. Born in 1989, Abigaël grew up in Fos-sur-Mer, the city hosting the Port of Marseille in southern France. At her lycée in Istres, there was the option to learn a third foreign language: Chinese. “I would have preferred to learn Arabic because that’s what all my friends spoke, but there was no choice. That’s how it became Mandarin,” and the journey started. This was when she visited China for the first time on a class trip to Beijing.
Like her start in Mandarin, the rest of the journey was a series of coincidences. For her studies in international relations at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, she had to choose between Spanish or Mandarin again. To deepen her language skills, she spent a year at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing during her studies. She finished her studies with fulfilling her dream of studying at a British university with a master’s degree in Asian Studies at SOAS in London.
There is one aspect of her work that she remains committed to throughout the years: Europe. While her path toward becoming a China expert was a series of coincidences, her commitment to Europe has been a priority from the beginning of her career. She explained that “the realization that China can’t just be looked at from a national perspective came pretty early on.” After her master’s degree, her work already took on a European focus: In the pan-European think tank ECFR, Abigaël worked closely with François Godement, a renowned French sinologist to establish an Asia program. Francois Godement became her mentor, and together they published the book “China at the gates: a new power audit of EU-China relations.”
The agenda for her new position is already filled: Among other things, it includes looking at EU engagement with China, notably in view of the high-level dialogues and possibly the upcoming EU-China summit. In her work at MERICS and as a true European, she says it is important for her to bring the French touch. “The Franco-German engine is important for Europe, notably vis-a-vis China.” After Brussels, Berlin will now be her new home. She is not a complete foreigner to Germany. She is married to a German, after all. Amelie Richter
