There is real trouble in the negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council on the statute for European political parties. In the Parliament, it is believed that the Council has launched a campaign against the European party families – led by France, seconded by Germany. In the capitals, they probably have something against self-confident EU parties. Now that Macron has shaken up the French party landscape, it’s the EU level’s turn, it is speculated. Markus Grabitz analyzes the situation.
The energy ministers also argued fiercely – and were still unable to reach an agreement on the gas price cap. But there is cause for optimism: “We are not opening the champagne yet, but we are putting the bottle in the fridge,” said Czech Minister of Industry and Trade Jozef Sikela, who chaired the talks. Manuel Berkel shows the lines of discussion.
The Czech presidency, on the other hand, sees time pressure in the trilogue negotiations on the Fit for 55 climate package. Claire Stam has taken a look at the state of the negotiations and gives an outlook on what the sticking points are and when the next deadlines are due.
The trilogue negotiations on the statute and financing of European parties are in danger of collapsing. The biggest point of contention is the membership of parties from non-EU countries in the European party families. The Council presidency is demanding that no party based in a non-EU country be allowed to be a member of the European party families. The European Parliament regards this as an affront
As a result, the planned trilogue on Dec. 7 may no longer take place. The fronts have hardened. The European Parliament now sees the member states’ line of negotiation as an attack on the right of European party families to organize themselves. Apparently, the member states have no interest in strong European party families.
The mandate for the Council’s party statute came into being in March, i.e. a few days after the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The demands that parties from third countries may not be members of European party families and for a ban on money flows from these parties to the European party families are aimed at Russia. This is because Russia’s influence – including through financial support – on parties in the EU is to be prevented.
The European Parliament supports the approach of eliminating Russian influence. However, the demanded measures would also make cooperation with like-minded parties from outside the EU no longer possible.
For example, the EPP alone cooperates with four parties in Ukraine and maintains contacts with a friendly party in Switzerland and Kosovo. The Left Party has a partnership with a party in Belarus that is critical of Moscow.
Memberships of non-EU parties exist with different rights depending on the statutes of the party family – from fully associated to observer status. They are seen as an instrument of EU neighborhood policy.
As recently as 2020, parties paid small amounts, essentially membership dues, to the EU parties of which they are members. But since the ACRE ruling, European party families are no longer allowed to receive money from non-EU parties. As a compromise, the European Parliament had proposed that money flows from parties from countries that are members of the Council of Europe and not subject to sanctions be allowed. This would exclude payments from Russia.
Payments from non-EU parties used to play a role in party funding – and should again, according to the will of the Commission and the parties. European party families currently have to cover at least ten percent of their budgets from their own funds (membership fees, donations, proceeds from events), and they get the rest from the EU budget. If they are not allowed to accept money from outside the EU, they will have fewer claims on the EU budget.
The Commission had proposed that the minimum share of own resources should drop to five percent and be eliminated altogether in years of European elections. The Socialist party family received around €11 million from the EU budget in 2019, the EPP €15 million, the Greens €3.5 million, the Left €2.2 million.
There is also a dispute about the right of party families to campaign in referendums on EU issues. Until now, this has been prohibited. For example, they were not allowed to advertise for the EU before the Brexit referendum. The European Parliament wants this ban to be relaxed. The member states are against it.
France in particular is considered a hardliner in the negotiations on the party statute. However, the German government and other member states fully support the hard line in the Council, according to the party families. The party statute is supposed to come into force in 2024, at the time of the next European elections. In the meantime, the Parliament does not rule out the possibility that the negotiations will fail and that the current rules will still apply in 2024.
The disagreement was so great that the energy ministers might as well have gone home, said Czech Council President Jozef Síkela yesterday after the Council meeting. What he meant was the dispute over the Commission’s proposal on the gas price cap on Tuesday. In the end, there was a compromise: The Council reached an agreement on the content of the two laws on joint European gas purchasing and on faster approval procedures for renewable energies.
However, the two legal texts are not to be formally adopted until the next extraordinary energy Council – together with the controversial gas price cap. A whole series of supporters, such as Belgium, Greece and Spain, did not want to give up these means of exerting pressure. The extraordinary meeting will probably take place on Dec. 13, with a regular meeting of energy ministers also scheduled for Dec. 19.
However, the Council presidency does not want to go for a majority decision in order to speed up the procedure. “I don’t expect there to be no agreement on the 13th. There is too much at stake for that,” said the Czech industry minister.
For gas and renewables legislation, the compromise reached yesterday means that further substantive negotiations “are not necessary,” according to Síkela. This is a bad result for both nature conservation and energy associations. Both camps still wanted substantial changes to the authorization law.
Germany’s State Secretary at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Sven Giegold (Greens), however, sold the substantive agreement as a major success for the German government and probably for his party in particular: “The EU recognizes that renewable energies and the necessary grid infrastructure are of outstanding public interest and thus have priority in approval and planning. This will massively accelerate expansion in the coming years.”
The Greens need this success for one of their central federal policy promises. But if there can only be a forced package solution with the gas price cap, Germany’s negotiating position is conceivably poor.
In any case, the front of the price cap opponents showed clear cracks yesterday. Austria’s Minister of Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology Leonore Gewessler (Greens), while reiterating that security of supply must be preserved, also said: “It is important that we leave no stone unturned to lower gas prices in Europe.”
Giegold himself let it be known that Germany is already working intensively on the criteria for a model that can be approved. For example, he said immediately before the Council meeting that a price cap should not apply for too long. Experts are nuanced about this, so a compromise could be found.
Proponents of the price cap also feel encouraged by the full gas storage facilities. Together with the mild weather so far, this winter is a good opportunity to test the functioning of the Market Correction Mechanism, said Greece’s Minister of the Environment and Energy Kostas Skrekas.
Skrekas described €150 to €200 as a reasonable level for the price cap. In contrast, the €275 per megawatt hour over a two-week period proposed by the Commission would have meant that the mechanism would not have been activated even at the peaks in the summer – which, according to Síkela, led to “heated discussions” in the Council.
However, Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson defended the chosen model yesterday: “The next period of high prices will probably not be comparable to the one in August.” She said the mechanism should not be activated again and again on a day-by-day basis, which is why the two weeks were chosen sensibly. If one parameter is changed, it would have an impact on the others, according to Simson.
However, the need to continue working on the details was emphasized by virtually all member states. “The Commission’s proposal has exactly the opposite of the desired effect. It will rather lead to an increase in gas prices,” said Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Ribera.
These concerns are also shared by the energy industry. “The so-called front-month trading on the exchange, to which the price cap applies, covers only a small part of gas trading,” said VKU head Ingbert Liebing. If the Emergency Ordinance were to come into force in this way, it was to be feared that gas purchased on the exchange could be sold at high cost and without relief for consumers in other trading places.
“It would also be conceivable that liquidity in futures trading would decline as a result of the price cap and that gas procurement would take place more in the spot market. This would increase price volatility and would be accompanied by more price risks, also for gas consumers,” said the head of the municipal utility.
In addition to the price level, the negotiations will now focus on the so-called safeguards until Dec. 13. The safeguards include, for example, that the price cap must not lead to rationing of gas. For Giegold, the Commission’s proposal is heading in the right direction, but “minor changes” are still necessary. However, a look at the text shows that there is a lack of verifiable criteria.
Spain, among others, is against a fixed price cap. “It would make much more sense to choose a dynamic price,” Ribera said. A surcharge on the changing LNG price on the world market is conceivable, for example. However, such a surcharge is already included in the Commission’s proposal, so there will be renegotiations.
But a dynamic cap is also seen by others as insurance against a permanent politicization of the gas price (Europe.Table reported). If the criteria for price adjustments were defined in advance in the Council decision, this could prevent governments from renegotiating the cap over and over again – at least that is the current hope.
“December will be the month of compromise. And everything will happen around Dec. 15, we will have a political showdown,” says Pieter de Pous. He is head of the Fossil Fuel Transition Program at think tank E3G. The outcome of the recent elections in Sweden, which saw the far right enter government, has created a sense of urgency, adds a diplomatic source. As a result, negotiations would have to be completed by the end of the Czech presidency.
The Swedes, who take over the presidency of the EU Council in January, have already indicated that the issue of energy efficiency (EED) will not be one of their priorities, the source continues. At the recent trilogue on Nov. 22, the co-legislators managed to reach a compromise on Article 3 on the principle of prioritizing energy efficiency, he says.
However, technical work is needed on Article 8 on the energy savings obligation and Article 4 on the energy savings target, the source said. This is because the Parliament is pushing for a 40 percent target for reducing energy consumption by 2030, while the Commission and Council set the target at nine percent. “Only a small number of member states are in favor of going beyond the nine percent target,” de Pous said.
The situation with the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is somewhat more promising. “There is a large majority of member states that support the 45 percent renewable energy target as proposed under RED,” de Pous says. The diplomatic source reports that negotiators have managed to finalize four of the five main topics of the last trilogue, namely the use of renewable energy at sea, in buildings, for heating and cooling.
The biggest obstacle is the definition of “green hydrogen.” Rapporteur Markus Pieper (EPP) notes that member states do not agree among themselves on the definition of green hydrogen. Moreover, the Commission has still not presented a definition of it, which was originally planned for the end of 2021. It has now committed to submitting these new rules (in jargon “additionality act”) to the relevant Council expert group and the Parliament quickly – by “the end of November, beginning of December”.
The parliamentary shadow rapporteurs will put pressure on the Commission to come up with the definition urgently needed by the industry as soon as possible. This is the only way to enable the investments needed for the new sector, according to European Parliament circles. Parliamentarians will try to turn the directive into a regulation if the Commission’s delegated act is not to the satisfaction of the European Parliament, Pieper says.
The inclusion of the transport and building sectors in CO2 emissions trading (ETS2) continues to meet with strong resistance in some member states, above all Poland and France, which fear an increase in heating and transport costs – and a yellow vest effect like in France. “It is mainly Germany that is in favor of the ETS2 and has to compromise on the Social Climate Fund,” says Pieter de Pous.
The Fit for 55 climate package is the implementation at EU level of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015. Behind the technical aspects of the negotiations currently underway in Brussels on the climate package is a clear challenge: the credibility of European climate policy on the international stage.
“It’s about showing the weaker countries that you are making progress at home, and this is particularly important in the run-up to COP28, where the Global Stocktake will take place,” analyzes de Pous. Indeed, adopting and implementing more ambitious targets under the Fit for 55 package would be able to increase the EU’s climate contribution (NDC) by up to 60 percent.
Café culture in Brussels. Temperatures are dropping – and the number of remotely working employees in cafés is rising. They stay late, consume little and save money: In view of rising electricity prices, which have more than doubled in the space of a year, employees are particularly keen to lighten the load on their wallets. When he asks his guests whether they will stay long, the answers are always the same, says the owner of a café not far from the famous Place Flagey. They do it because it is nicer than staying at home and also cheaper. The situation is similar in the Centre and Saint-Gilles neighborhoods when the same question is asked at the counter.
Some café owners have reacted to the “squatteurs de table” – which could be roughly translated as table squatters – by turning up the music so that some patrons are already sitting in the café with headphones. Or they turn off the WiFi. Or they take an educational approach and ask the guests to pack their things. This is especially true at lunchtime, to keep the tables free for guests who actually come to eat.
What may seem like an amusing anecdote at first glance, however, harbors an ice-cold reality in the thermal and political sense of the word: While Germany is preparing to introduce an electricity price cap, which is already being implemented in France, Belgium only has social tariffs for low-income households. The middle class and a large number of companies, on the other hand, are feeling the full force of rising energy prices. Inflation in Belgium rose from 11.3 percent to 12.3 percent in October, its highest level since June 1975, when it was 12.50 percent.
Translated to the level of cafés, for example, this means that the electricity and gas bill of our café owner near Place Flagey has risen from €2,500 to €6,500 per month in one year. And it’s not just cafés that are affected, but also food shops, bakeries, artisans. All are experiencing how the prices for raw materials are skyrocketing.
The Belgian government does not have the same economic and financial leeway as its two large neighbors. It is therefore not surprising that Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and his Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten are calling for a European solution. They are aware of the great social instability that the price hike may trigger in their country. After all the energy summits, Belgians have yet to see concrete results – prices are still high. And they need results that have an immediate impact.
There is real trouble in the negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council on the statute for European political parties. In the Parliament, it is believed that the Council has launched a campaign against the European party families – led by France, seconded by Germany. In the capitals, they probably have something against self-confident EU parties. Now that Macron has shaken up the French party landscape, it’s the EU level’s turn, it is speculated. Markus Grabitz analyzes the situation.
The energy ministers also argued fiercely – and were still unable to reach an agreement on the gas price cap. But there is cause for optimism: “We are not opening the champagne yet, but we are putting the bottle in the fridge,” said Czech Minister of Industry and Trade Jozef Sikela, who chaired the talks. Manuel Berkel shows the lines of discussion.
The Czech presidency, on the other hand, sees time pressure in the trilogue negotiations on the Fit for 55 climate package. Claire Stam has taken a look at the state of the negotiations and gives an outlook on what the sticking points are and when the next deadlines are due.
The trilogue negotiations on the statute and financing of European parties are in danger of collapsing. The biggest point of contention is the membership of parties from non-EU countries in the European party families. The Council presidency is demanding that no party based in a non-EU country be allowed to be a member of the European party families. The European Parliament regards this as an affront
As a result, the planned trilogue on Dec. 7 may no longer take place. The fronts have hardened. The European Parliament now sees the member states’ line of negotiation as an attack on the right of European party families to organize themselves. Apparently, the member states have no interest in strong European party families.
The mandate for the Council’s party statute came into being in March, i.e. a few days after the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The demands that parties from third countries may not be members of European party families and for a ban on money flows from these parties to the European party families are aimed at Russia. This is because Russia’s influence – including through financial support – on parties in the EU is to be prevented.
The European Parliament supports the approach of eliminating Russian influence. However, the demanded measures would also make cooperation with like-minded parties from outside the EU no longer possible.
For example, the EPP alone cooperates with four parties in Ukraine and maintains contacts with a friendly party in Switzerland and Kosovo. The Left Party has a partnership with a party in Belarus that is critical of Moscow.
Memberships of non-EU parties exist with different rights depending on the statutes of the party family – from fully associated to observer status. They are seen as an instrument of EU neighborhood policy.
As recently as 2020, parties paid small amounts, essentially membership dues, to the EU parties of which they are members. But since the ACRE ruling, European party families are no longer allowed to receive money from non-EU parties. As a compromise, the European Parliament had proposed that money flows from parties from countries that are members of the Council of Europe and not subject to sanctions be allowed. This would exclude payments from Russia.
Payments from non-EU parties used to play a role in party funding – and should again, according to the will of the Commission and the parties. European party families currently have to cover at least ten percent of their budgets from their own funds (membership fees, donations, proceeds from events), and they get the rest from the EU budget. If they are not allowed to accept money from outside the EU, they will have fewer claims on the EU budget.
The Commission had proposed that the minimum share of own resources should drop to five percent and be eliminated altogether in years of European elections. The Socialist party family received around €11 million from the EU budget in 2019, the EPP €15 million, the Greens €3.5 million, the Left €2.2 million.
There is also a dispute about the right of party families to campaign in referendums on EU issues. Until now, this has been prohibited. For example, they were not allowed to advertise for the EU before the Brexit referendum. The European Parliament wants this ban to be relaxed. The member states are against it.
France in particular is considered a hardliner in the negotiations on the party statute. However, the German government and other member states fully support the hard line in the Council, according to the party families. The party statute is supposed to come into force in 2024, at the time of the next European elections. In the meantime, the Parliament does not rule out the possibility that the negotiations will fail and that the current rules will still apply in 2024.
The disagreement was so great that the energy ministers might as well have gone home, said Czech Council President Jozef Síkela yesterday after the Council meeting. What he meant was the dispute over the Commission’s proposal on the gas price cap on Tuesday. In the end, there was a compromise: The Council reached an agreement on the content of the two laws on joint European gas purchasing and on faster approval procedures for renewable energies.
However, the two legal texts are not to be formally adopted until the next extraordinary energy Council – together with the controversial gas price cap. A whole series of supporters, such as Belgium, Greece and Spain, did not want to give up these means of exerting pressure. The extraordinary meeting will probably take place on Dec. 13, with a regular meeting of energy ministers also scheduled for Dec. 19.
However, the Council presidency does not want to go for a majority decision in order to speed up the procedure. “I don’t expect there to be no agreement on the 13th. There is too much at stake for that,” said the Czech industry minister.
For gas and renewables legislation, the compromise reached yesterday means that further substantive negotiations “are not necessary,” according to Síkela. This is a bad result for both nature conservation and energy associations. Both camps still wanted substantial changes to the authorization law.
Germany’s State Secretary at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Sven Giegold (Greens), however, sold the substantive agreement as a major success for the German government and probably for his party in particular: “The EU recognizes that renewable energies and the necessary grid infrastructure are of outstanding public interest and thus have priority in approval and planning. This will massively accelerate expansion in the coming years.”
The Greens need this success for one of their central federal policy promises. But if there can only be a forced package solution with the gas price cap, Germany’s negotiating position is conceivably poor.
In any case, the front of the price cap opponents showed clear cracks yesterday. Austria’s Minister of Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology Leonore Gewessler (Greens), while reiterating that security of supply must be preserved, also said: “It is important that we leave no stone unturned to lower gas prices in Europe.”
Giegold himself let it be known that Germany is already working intensively on the criteria for a model that can be approved. For example, he said immediately before the Council meeting that a price cap should not apply for too long. Experts are nuanced about this, so a compromise could be found.
Proponents of the price cap also feel encouraged by the full gas storage facilities. Together with the mild weather so far, this winter is a good opportunity to test the functioning of the Market Correction Mechanism, said Greece’s Minister of the Environment and Energy Kostas Skrekas.
Skrekas described €150 to €200 as a reasonable level for the price cap. In contrast, the €275 per megawatt hour over a two-week period proposed by the Commission would have meant that the mechanism would not have been activated even at the peaks in the summer – which, according to Síkela, led to “heated discussions” in the Council.
However, Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson defended the chosen model yesterday: “The next period of high prices will probably not be comparable to the one in August.” She said the mechanism should not be activated again and again on a day-by-day basis, which is why the two weeks were chosen sensibly. If one parameter is changed, it would have an impact on the others, according to Simson.
However, the need to continue working on the details was emphasized by virtually all member states. “The Commission’s proposal has exactly the opposite of the desired effect. It will rather lead to an increase in gas prices,” said Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Ribera.
These concerns are also shared by the energy industry. “The so-called front-month trading on the exchange, to which the price cap applies, covers only a small part of gas trading,” said VKU head Ingbert Liebing. If the Emergency Ordinance were to come into force in this way, it was to be feared that gas purchased on the exchange could be sold at high cost and without relief for consumers in other trading places.
“It would also be conceivable that liquidity in futures trading would decline as a result of the price cap and that gas procurement would take place more in the spot market. This would increase price volatility and would be accompanied by more price risks, also for gas consumers,” said the head of the municipal utility.
In addition to the price level, the negotiations will now focus on the so-called safeguards until Dec. 13. The safeguards include, for example, that the price cap must not lead to rationing of gas. For Giegold, the Commission’s proposal is heading in the right direction, but “minor changes” are still necessary. However, a look at the text shows that there is a lack of verifiable criteria.
Spain, among others, is against a fixed price cap. “It would make much more sense to choose a dynamic price,” Ribera said. A surcharge on the changing LNG price on the world market is conceivable, for example. However, such a surcharge is already included in the Commission’s proposal, so there will be renegotiations.
But a dynamic cap is also seen by others as insurance against a permanent politicization of the gas price (Europe.Table reported). If the criteria for price adjustments were defined in advance in the Council decision, this could prevent governments from renegotiating the cap over and over again – at least that is the current hope.
“December will be the month of compromise. And everything will happen around Dec. 15, we will have a political showdown,” says Pieter de Pous. He is head of the Fossil Fuel Transition Program at think tank E3G. The outcome of the recent elections in Sweden, which saw the far right enter government, has created a sense of urgency, adds a diplomatic source. As a result, negotiations would have to be completed by the end of the Czech presidency.
The Swedes, who take over the presidency of the EU Council in January, have already indicated that the issue of energy efficiency (EED) will not be one of their priorities, the source continues. At the recent trilogue on Nov. 22, the co-legislators managed to reach a compromise on Article 3 on the principle of prioritizing energy efficiency, he says.
However, technical work is needed on Article 8 on the energy savings obligation and Article 4 on the energy savings target, the source said. This is because the Parliament is pushing for a 40 percent target for reducing energy consumption by 2030, while the Commission and Council set the target at nine percent. “Only a small number of member states are in favor of going beyond the nine percent target,” de Pous said.
The situation with the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is somewhat more promising. “There is a large majority of member states that support the 45 percent renewable energy target as proposed under RED,” de Pous says. The diplomatic source reports that negotiators have managed to finalize four of the five main topics of the last trilogue, namely the use of renewable energy at sea, in buildings, for heating and cooling.
The biggest obstacle is the definition of “green hydrogen.” Rapporteur Markus Pieper (EPP) notes that member states do not agree among themselves on the definition of green hydrogen. Moreover, the Commission has still not presented a definition of it, which was originally planned for the end of 2021. It has now committed to submitting these new rules (in jargon “additionality act”) to the relevant Council expert group and the Parliament quickly – by “the end of November, beginning of December”.
The parliamentary shadow rapporteurs will put pressure on the Commission to come up with the definition urgently needed by the industry as soon as possible. This is the only way to enable the investments needed for the new sector, according to European Parliament circles. Parliamentarians will try to turn the directive into a regulation if the Commission’s delegated act is not to the satisfaction of the European Parliament, Pieper says.
The inclusion of the transport and building sectors in CO2 emissions trading (ETS2) continues to meet with strong resistance in some member states, above all Poland and France, which fear an increase in heating and transport costs – and a yellow vest effect like in France. “It is mainly Germany that is in favor of the ETS2 and has to compromise on the Social Climate Fund,” says Pieter de Pous.
The Fit for 55 climate package is the implementation at EU level of the Paris Agreement adopted in 2015. Behind the technical aspects of the negotiations currently underway in Brussels on the climate package is a clear challenge: the credibility of European climate policy on the international stage.
“It’s about showing the weaker countries that you are making progress at home, and this is particularly important in the run-up to COP28, where the Global Stocktake will take place,” analyzes de Pous. Indeed, adopting and implementing more ambitious targets under the Fit for 55 package would be able to increase the EU’s climate contribution (NDC) by up to 60 percent.
Café culture in Brussels. Temperatures are dropping – and the number of remotely working employees in cafés is rising. They stay late, consume little and save money: In view of rising electricity prices, which have more than doubled in the space of a year, employees are particularly keen to lighten the load on their wallets. When he asks his guests whether they will stay long, the answers are always the same, says the owner of a café not far from the famous Place Flagey. They do it because it is nicer than staying at home and also cheaper. The situation is similar in the Centre and Saint-Gilles neighborhoods when the same question is asked at the counter.
Some café owners have reacted to the “squatteurs de table” – which could be roughly translated as table squatters – by turning up the music so that some patrons are already sitting in the café with headphones. Or they turn off the WiFi. Or they take an educational approach and ask the guests to pack their things. This is especially true at lunchtime, to keep the tables free for guests who actually come to eat.
What may seem like an amusing anecdote at first glance, however, harbors an ice-cold reality in the thermal and political sense of the word: While Germany is preparing to introduce an electricity price cap, which is already being implemented in France, Belgium only has social tariffs for low-income households. The middle class and a large number of companies, on the other hand, are feeling the full force of rising energy prices. Inflation in Belgium rose from 11.3 percent to 12.3 percent in October, its highest level since June 1975, when it was 12.50 percent.
Translated to the level of cafés, for example, this means that the electricity and gas bill of our café owner near Place Flagey has risen from €2,500 to €6,500 per month in one year. And it’s not just cafés that are affected, but also food shops, bakeries, artisans. All are experiencing how the prices for raw materials are skyrocketing.
The Belgian government does not have the same economic and financial leeway as its two large neighbors. It is therefore not surprising that Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo and his Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten are calling for a European solution. They are aware of the great social instability that the price hike may trigger in their country. After all the energy summits, Belgians have yet to see concrete results – prices are still high. And they need results that have an immediate impact.
