The European party families are not in a particularly good financial position. Additionally, their chairmanship has always been an honorary office. This has always been the case when the party leader was also a European Parliament member and thus had tenure security. With Manfred Weber from Lower Bavaria, elected head of the EPP in May, the European Christian Democrats could now ring in a new era financially and say goodbye to the top post just for honor’s sake, as Markus Grabitz reports.
Italy has elected a new parliament. The center-right alliance was the clear favorite. Yet many voters were undecided until the very end and voter turnout was low. We have the preliminary election results for you – shortly after the polls closed at 11 p.m. on Sunday.
Citizens also went to the polls in the Czech Republic, which currently holds the Council presidency. In the local elections and the first round of the Senate elections, the liberal and conservative governing parties did surprisingly well. Read more about it in the News.
Travel is the best education, they always say, and indeed traveling can give you new insights and help you understand things better. Ursula von der Leyen was in New York, MEPs from the JURI Committee visited interlocutors in Washington, and LIBE Committee members were on the road in Ireland on data protection issues. Read what the travelers brought back with them – or announced abroad – as well as that the EU prepares further sanctions against Russia in today’s News.
In Germany, the debate about the right instrument for getting high gas prices under control continues. A gas price brake is increasingly coming into focus, while the planned gas levy finds fewer and fewer supporters. German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also expressed doubts about the surcharge for millions of customers to compensate for higher gas procurement costs. “For me, the gas surcharge poses less of a legal question and more and more of a question of economic sensibility,” the FDP leader told Bild am Sonntag. “We have a gas levy that increases the price. But we need a gas price brake that lowers the price.” Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Qatar to clarify new LNG supplies for Germany. Energy remains a hot topic.
I wish you a great start to the week.
In May, Manfred Weber, the long-time EPP Group leader in the European Parliament, was also elected chairman of the party at the convention of the European Christian Democrats in Rotterdam. According to information available to Europe.Table, the EPP presidium subsequently made a decision that raises questions: The party presidium decided that the party leader was entitled to remuneration, according to EPP circles. The leadership circle includes the ten elected deputies, as well as the President of the Commission and the President of the Parliament by virtue of their office.
However, the committee was not informed whether Weber received a salary and if so, how much it was. A spokeswoman for Weber at the party would not comment on this when asked: “The EPP does not provide any information on the payment of its leadership.” There is also no information on whether the presidium had decided that the party leader can receive a payment.
The caginess is surprising: Until now, the chief post in the Christian Democratic party family has always been an honorary post, if the incumbent was otherwise financially secure. Why doesn’t the EPP clarify the financial circumstances if nothing has changed?
Things were different for Weber’s predecessor at the head of the EPP. Donald Tusk was party leader for almost three years without holding any other office. The Pole was paid by the party; estimates put his monthly salary at at least €13,000. The secretary-general reportedly earns somewhat less. Tusk’s predecessor Joseph Daul, an Alsatian and supporter of Weber, was EPP party leader from 2013 to 2019. When he did not return to the European Parliament in 2014, he received a salary as party leader. If Weber were now to recieve a double salary, this would raise eyebrows not only in the party.
As a member of the European Parliament, the 50-year-old from Lower Bavaria, who is also CSU vice president and won the most votes as the Christian Democrats’ top candidate in the last European elections, receives a monthly diet of €9,386.29 before taxes and duties. After deducting EU taxes and an insurance contribution, that leaves €7,316.63 a month. There may be further taxes in Germany.
Weber is the leader of the largest group in the European Parliament with 176 members. Unlike in the Bundestag, group leaders in the EU’s parliament do not receive allowances. However, they are entitled to a privilege in terms of meeting allowances. Normal deputies must sign the attendance lists in Strasbourg and Brussels in the parliament. Otherwise, they do not receive the daily allowance of €338 to cover all expenses.
The heads of the parliamentary groups and the President of the Parliament, on the other hand, can choose: They can either indicate to the secretariat on which days they are on duty. In this case, the daily allowance is calculated on a daily basis. Or they can choose the flat-rate solution. Then they receive a daily allowance for 365 days a year. It is not known which arrangement Manfred Weber uses.
The other parties are more transparent than the European Christian Democrats when it comes to paying their top personnel. In the case of the European Greens, only the secretary-general receives an actual salary. All other top jobs are honorary positions. Party leaders Mélanie Vogel and Thomas Waitz, as well as the other members of the leadership circle, can claim daily rates of €200 as expenses when they are on assignment. However, only 60 times a year. “There is a right to it, not an obligation,” a party spokesman notes. It is also often waived, he adds.
In the European family of parties of the Socialists (PES), there is also a clear statement: “The president does not receive a salary from the party. This applies when he is a member of the European Parliament, a member of another parliament, and in all other cases.”
The SPD, on the other hand, pays its two party leaders, Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil, who are both also members of the Bundestag, and makes no secret of it. Esken and Klingbeil earn €9,000 a month as party leaders.
At the CSU party headquarters in Munich, where Manfred Weber’s rise in Europe began, they are not holding back on information about the remuneration of the head of the Bavarian Christian Socialists: “The chairman works on an honorary basis and does not receive a cent.”
The center-right alliance led by Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, won Italy’s parliamentary elections, as evidenced by the results early Monday morning, which have yet to be consolidated in the coming hours. “Italians have voted for a center-right government led by the Fratelli d’Italia. It is the time of responsibility. Italy elected us and we will not betray Italy. We are called to govern this country. We will govern for all Italians so that Italians can be proud to be Italian again,” Meloni said at 2:30 a.m. in a 10-minute statement on the election results at her party’s headquarters in Rome.
According to state broadcaster Rai, projections showed Fratelli d’Italia received 26 percent of the vote, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord slipped below the 10 percent mark with 8.7 percent, while Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia came in at eight percent. This puts the center-right coalition ahead of the left-wing parties. Enrico Letta’s Democratic Party (PD) scored 19 percent and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Azione-Italia Viva 7.3 percent. Giuseppe Corte’s 5-Star Movement came in with 16.5 percent of the vote. Voter turnout was just 63.8 percent. This is the lowest figure in the country’s history and is nine percentage points lower than four years ago.
In her speech, Meloni also addressed the low turnout, pointing out that the challenge was to restore Italians’ faith in institutions and restore the relationship between the state and its citizens. The election winner also mentioned that her party had been attacked during the campaign, particularly for the “myths that were spread about the party”. Meloni’s party is often described as post-fascist. Fratelli d’Italia was founded in 2012 and grew out of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded by supporters of dictator Benito Mussolini.
According to projections so far, the center-right alliance would win between 227 and 257 of the 400 seats in the lower house and between 111 and 131 of the 200 seats in the Senate. The electoral victory of the center-right alliance is mainly due to Meloni’s party, which increased its 2018 result six-fold: from four to 26 percent. Meloni’s large lead makes her the favorite for the job of forming a government by head of state Sergio Mattarella. The 45-year-old politician could become the first woman in the history of the republic to enter Pallazo Chigi as head of government.
Italy’s electoral system is a mix of proportional and first-past-the-post voting, which is used to elect 400 deputies and 200 senators. The electoral law, passed in 2017, is called Rosatellum. It is named after its author Ettore Rosato, a deputy from the Democratic Party (PD) of former head of government Enrico Letta. According to experts, the dynamics of the elections are determined by the rewards of the coalitions formed before the elections.
The left, headed by the PD, was unable to reach an agreement with the various forces that could have been a part of the alliance. Given the result of Giuseppe Conte’s 5-Star Movement (M5S), both forces could have formed a competitive bloc. This could even have been joined by a coalition of smaller parties, as the so-called Third Pole (8.5 percent), an alliance of small liberal center parties led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and one of his former ministers, Carlo Calenda, also grew.
The right-wing coalition had not governed since Berlusconi’s last government fell in 2011, when Italy was on the brink of bankruptcy and Meloni was youth minister. On the eve of the elections, experts credited the M5S with the possibility of preventing the center-right coalition from winning, but only on the condition that both the PD and the M5S achieved a good result. In particular, the M5S’s rise in the south of the country looked promising. With the result of 16.5 percent for the M5S, which thus became the third political force in these elections, Conte undoubtedly achieved success. A remarkable result after he and his party were responsible for the fall of Draghi’s government and his party was predicted to do poorly.
“Everyone wanted us out of parliament. Everyone gave us a low result. We are the third political force. So we have a big responsibility. We assure the Italians who voted for us that we will form a strong opposition to implement the program we talked about during the election campaign,” Conte said on Monday morning in response to his election result. “The fact that we are the first party in the South is very important because we stand for social inequality. If the South doesn’t grow, the North will have problems realizing its potential,” Conte added.
Asked by journalists about a possible alliance with the PD in the early hours of the morning, Conte replied, “The PD’s decisions have affected the outcome of the elections. The center-right has managed to form an alliance. If the PD, even as an opposition party, joins our struggles, it will be welcome, but without the need for an alliance.” With this, Conte underlined precisely this lack of agreement with Letta. The PD leader made no statement after the results overnight, but announced that he would speak at 11 a.m. Monday morning.
Political pundits who spoke to the Italian media early Monday morning attributed the outcome of the elections primarily to popular discontent and indifference. The low turnout testifies to dissatisfaction and the need to bet on something new, or even a normalization of the extreme right in Italy. The results also show that a large part of the population that did not vote for this option is not worried about it. In analyses by Italian television, Rai partially criticized speculation by foreign media that Italy is becoming a fascist country. They see Meloni as a young politician who will try to take a moderate line.
A statement Friday by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered a glimpse into the tensions surrounding Italy’s political transition. “My attitude is that we will work with any democratic government that wants to do so. If things go in a difficult direction, as I said with regard to Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” she said at a Princeton conference in response to a question from students about her assessment of how Italy will behave after the election.
Italy is currently in a very complex economic situation that requires the support and cooperation of the European Union. Whoever takes over the economic portfolio will have a very important role to play. ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta has rejected Giorgia Meloni’s demands to take over as finance minister, as discussed in various media outlets over the past two weeks.
Leading Euroskeptic politicians such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen and Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki were among the first to congratulate Meloni as soon as the first results of the vote were announced overnight.
Combined door-to-door transport via rail, road and waterways is the future of sustainable commercial transport in Europe. This intelligent and seamless linking of the three classic modes of transport can reduce greenhouse gas emissions – compared to full long-distance transport by truck – by up to 90 percent and increase energy efficiency by up to 70 percent.
Due to these benefits, intermodal freight transport can make a decisive contribution to achieving the EU’s ambitious climate targets and reducing CO2 emissions by 55 percent by 2030. One key reason is that intermodal transport does not require the goods themselves to be reloaded. Instead, only the loading unit (container, swap body or semi-trailer) changes transport mode: for example, from the short-haul truck to the climate-friendly long-haul rail link and back again.
This enormous potential of combined door-to-door freight transport is not a distant dream of the future but lived practice. For example, since September 12, 2022, there has been a continuous rail connection of more than 2,000 kilometers from the Barcelona intermodal terminal via Duisburg to Poland to the Poznań and Łódź transshipment terminals there and back again, three times a week.
Combined freight transports have been running for longer and even more frequently between Luxembourg and Le Boulou in southern France (25 times a week), Trieste (twelve times), Lyon (six times), Antwerp, Kiel and Rostock (three times), and Valenton (once). The freight train to Le Boulou alone is up to 850 meters long and transports up to 60 semi-trailers. Today, almost 90 percent of intermodal freight trains already cross at least one border, covering an average of around 920 kilometers. This makes combined transport the dominant form of long-distance cross-border freight transport in Europe.
An important time to decisively advance intermodal freight transport is the EU negotiations currently underway to revise the regulation on guidelines for the development of a trans-European transport network (TEN-T). Since, according to the Green Deal, the market share of rail freight transport is to double by 2050, the infrastructure required for this must function much better than it does at present.
Against this backdrop, we welcome the EU Commission’s plans to adapt the rail infrastructure accordingly. The plans include:
In order to realize these plans, it is necessary that the EU member states and the European Parliament support this expansion of the transport infrastructure planned by the European Commission in favor of intermodal freight transport. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case in the past.
Although the shift of freight transport from road to rail has been a clear political goal of the European Union since 2001, the market share of road freight transport has since risen to around 76 percent – around half of this in long-distance freight transport. With the unfortunate consequence that the transport segment has increased its CO2 emissions – the only European industry to do so. If the EU wants to achieve its energy and climate targets, this trend must not only be stopped but reversed.
Here, the EU could take its cue from a current regulation issued by the German government: The Energy Security Transport Ordinance (EnSiTrV), published in mid-September, gives absolute priority to freight trains transporting coal, oil and liquefied gas in rail transport in order to use these “energy trains” to make up for the supply gap created by the loss of Russian pipeline gas. Numerous intermodal freight trains are also currently operating in Germany as “energy trains” by carrying liquefied gas in tank containers, for example. It would therefore be an important step if the EU also recognized intermodal freight trains as “energy trains” and gave them priority on the rail network.
Conclusion: Combined door-to-door transport is a doubly positive influencing factor for the realization of the EU decisions to curb global warming. On the one hand, it makes it possible to shift freight transport to energy-efficient and low CO2 means of transport and, on the other hand, to significantly reduce the consumption of diesel in freight transport and logistics. Additionally, intermodal transport relieves congested roads and residents, increasing labor efficiency, as one train driver can replace up to 50 truck drivers in long-distance transport. And intermodal transport creates jobs with high added value as well as an appropriate work-life balance in every link of the transport chain.
The European party families are not in a particularly good financial position. Additionally, their chairmanship has always been an honorary office. This has always been the case when the party leader was also a European Parliament member and thus had tenure security. With Manfred Weber from Lower Bavaria, elected head of the EPP in May, the European Christian Democrats could now ring in a new era financially and say goodbye to the top post just for honor’s sake, as Markus Grabitz reports.
Italy has elected a new parliament. The center-right alliance was the clear favorite. Yet many voters were undecided until the very end and voter turnout was low. We have the preliminary election results for you – shortly after the polls closed at 11 p.m. on Sunday.
Citizens also went to the polls in the Czech Republic, which currently holds the Council presidency. In the local elections and the first round of the Senate elections, the liberal and conservative governing parties did surprisingly well. Read more about it in the News.
Travel is the best education, they always say, and indeed traveling can give you new insights and help you understand things better. Ursula von der Leyen was in New York, MEPs from the JURI Committee visited interlocutors in Washington, and LIBE Committee members were on the road in Ireland on data protection issues. Read what the travelers brought back with them – or announced abroad – as well as that the EU prepares further sanctions against Russia in today’s News.
In Germany, the debate about the right instrument for getting high gas prices under control continues. A gas price brake is increasingly coming into focus, while the planned gas levy finds fewer and fewer supporters. German Finance Minister Christian Lindner also expressed doubts about the surcharge for millions of customers to compensate for higher gas procurement costs. “For me, the gas surcharge poses less of a legal question and more and more of a question of economic sensibility,” the FDP leader told Bild am Sonntag. “We have a gas levy that increases the price. But we need a gas price brake that lowers the price.” Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Qatar to clarify new LNG supplies for Germany. Energy remains a hot topic.
I wish you a great start to the week.
In May, Manfred Weber, the long-time EPP Group leader in the European Parliament, was also elected chairman of the party at the convention of the European Christian Democrats in Rotterdam. According to information available to Europe.Table, the EPP presidium subsequently made a decision that raises questions: The party presidium decided that the party leader was entitled to remuneration, according to EPP circles. The leadership circle includes the ten elected deputies, as well as the President of the Commission and the President of the Parliament by virtue of their office.
However, the committee was not informed whether Weber received a salary and if so, how much it was. A spokeswoman for Weber at the party would not comment on this when asked: “The EPP does not provide any information on the payment of its leadership.” There is also no information on whether the presidium had decided that the party leader can receive a payment.
The caginess is surprising: Until now, the chief post in the Christian Democratic party family has always been an honorary post, if the incumbent was otherwise financially secure. Why doesn’t the EPP clarify the financial circumstances if nothing has changed?
Things were different for Weber’s predecessor at the head of the EPP. Donald Tusk was party leader for almost three years without holding any other office. The Pole was paid by the party; estimates put his monthly salary at at least €13,000. The secretary-general reportedly earns somewhat less. Tusk’s predecessor Joseph Daul, an Alsatian and supporter of Weber, was EPP party leader from 2013 to 2019. When he did not return to the European Parliament in 2014, he received a salary as party leader. If Weber were now to recieve a double salary, this would raise eyebrows not only in the party.
As a member of the European Parliament, the 50-year-old from Lower Bavaria, who is also CSU vice president and won the most votes as the Christian Democrats’ top candidate in the last European elections, receives a monthly diet of €9,386.29 before taxes and duties. After deducting EU taxes and an insurance contribution, that leaves €7,316.63 a month. There may be further taxes in Germany.
Weber is the leader of the largest group in the European Parliament with 176 members. Unlike in the Bundestag, group leaders in the EU’s parliament do not receive allowances. However, they are entitled to a privilege in terms of meeting allowances. Normal deputies must sign the attendance lists in Strasbourg and Brussels in the parliament. Otherwise, they do not receive the daily allowance of €338 to cover all expenses.
The heads of the parliamentary groups and the President of the Parliament, on the other hand, can choose: They can either indicate to the secretariat on which days they are on duty. In this case, the daily allowance is calculated on a daily basis. Or they can choose the flat-rate solution. Then they receive a daily allowance for 365 days a year. It is not known which arrangement Manfred Weber uses.
The other parties are more transparent than the European Christian Democrats when it comes to paying their top personnel. In the case of the European Greens, only the secretary-general receives an actual salary. All other top jobs are honorary positions. Party leaders Mélanie Vogel and Thomas Waitz, as well as the other members of the leadership circle, can claim daily rates of €200 as expenses when they are on assignment. However, only 60 times a year. “There is a right to it, not an obligation,” a party spokesman notes. It is also often waived, he adds.
In the European family of parties of the Socialists (PES), there is also a clear statement: “The president does not receive a salary from the party. This applies when he is a member of the European Parliament, a member of another parliament, and in all other cases.”
The SPD, on the other hand, pays its two party leaders, Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil, who are both also members of the Bundestag, and makes no secret of it. Esken and Klingbeil earn €9,000 a month as party leaders.
At the CSU party headquarters in Munich, where Manfred Weber’s rise in Europe began, they are not holding back on information about the remuneration of the head of the Bavarian Christian Socialists: “The chairman works on an honorary basis and does not receive a cent.”
The center-right alliance led by Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Fratelli d’Italia party, won Italy’s parliamentary elections, as evidenced by the results early Monday morning, which have yet to be consolidated in the coming hours. “Italians have voted for a center-right government led by the Fratelli d’Italia. It is the time of responsibility. Italy elected us and we will not betray Italy. We are called to govern this country. We will govern for all Italians so that Italians can be proud to be Italian again,” Meloni said at 2:30 a.m. in a 10-minute statement on the election results at her party’s headquarters in Rome.
According to state broadcaster Rai, projections showed Fratelli d’Italia received 26 percent of the vote, Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord slipped below the 10 percent mark with 8.7 percent, while Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia came in at eight percent. This puts the center-right coalition ahead of the left-wing parties. Enrico Letta’s Democratic Party (PD) scored 19 percent and former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Azione-Italia Viva 7.3 percent. Giuseppe Corte’s 5-Star Movement came in with 16.5 percent of the vote. Voter turnout was just 63.8 percent. This is the lowest figure in the country’s history and is nine percentage points lower than four years ago.
In her speech, Meloni also addressed the low turnout, pointing out that the challenge was to restore Italians’ faith in institutions and restore the relationship between the state and its citizens. The election winner also mentioned that her party had been attacked during the campaign, particularly for the “myths that were spread about the party”. Meloni’s party is often described as post-fascist. Fratelli d’Italia was founded in 2012 and grew out of the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded by supporters of dictator Benito Mussolini.
According to projections so far, the center-right alliance would win between 227 and 257 of the 400 seats in the lower house and between 111 and 131 of the 200 seats in the Senate. The electoral victory of the center-right alliance is mainly due to Meloni’s party, which increased its 2018 result six-fold: from four to 26 percent. Meloni’s large lead makes her the favorite for the job of forming a government by head of state Sergio Mattarella. The 45-year-old politician could become the first woman in the history of the republic to enter Pallazo Chigi as head of government.
Italy’s electoral system is a mix of proportional and first-past-the-post voting, which is used to elect 400 deputies and 200 senators. The electoral law, passed in 2017, is called Rosatellum. It is named after its author Ettore Rosato, a deputy from the Democratic Party (PD) of former head of government Enrico Letta. According to experts, the dynamics of the elections are determined by the rewards of the coalitions formed before the elections.
The left, headed by the PD, was unable to reach an agreement with the various forces that could have been a part of the alliance. Given the result of Giuseppe Conte’s 5-Star Movement (M5S), both forces could have formed a competitive bloc. This could even have been joined by a coalition of smaller parties, as the so-called Third Pole (8.5 percent), an alliance of small liberal center parties led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and one of his former ministers, Carlo Calenda, also grew.
The right-wing coalition had not governed since Berlusconi’s last government fell in 2011, when Italy was on the brink of bankruptcy and Meloni was youth minister. On the eve of the elections, experts credited the M5S with the possibility of preventing the center-right coalition from winning, but only on the condition that both the PD and the M5S achieved a good result. In particular, the M5S’s rise in the south of the country looked promising. With the result of 16.5 percent for the M5S, which thus became the third political force in these elections, Conte undoubtedly achieved success. A remarkable result after he and his party were responsible for the fall of Draghi’s government and his party was predicted to do poorly.
“Everyone wanted us out of parliament. Everyone gave us a low result. We are the third political force. So we have a big responsibility. We assure the Italians who voted for us that we will form a strong opposition to implement the program we talked about during the election campaign,” Conte said on Monday morning in response to his election result. “The fact that we are the first party in the South is very important because we stand for social inequality. If the South doesn’t grow, the North will have problems realizing its potential,” Conte added.
Asked by journalists about a possible alliance with the PD in the early hours of the morning, Conte replied, “The PD’s decisions have affected the outcome of the elections. The center-right has managed to form an alliance. If the PD, even as an opposition party, joins our struggles, it will be welcome, but without the need for an alliance.” With this, Conte underlined precisely this lack of agreement with Letta. The PD leader made no statement after the results overnight, but announced that he would speak at 11 a.m. Monday morning.
Political pundits who spoke to the Italian media early Monday morning attributed the outcome of the elections primarily to popular discontent and indifference. The low turnout testifies to dissatisfaction and the need to bet on something new, or even a normalization of the extreme right in Italy. The results also show that a large part of the population that did not vote for this option is not worried about it. In analyses by Italian television, Rai partially criticized speculation by foreign media that Italy is becoming a fascist country. They see Meloni as a young politician who will try to take a moderate line.
A statement Friday by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered a glimpse into the tensions surrounding Italy’s political transition. “My attitude is that we will work with any democratic government that wants to do so. If things go in a difficult direction, as I said with regard to Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” she said at a Princeton conference in response to a question from students about her assessment of how Italy will behave after the election.
Italy is currently in a very complex economic situation that requires the support and cooperation of the European Union. Whoever takes over the economic portfolio will have a very important role to play. ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta has rejected Giorgia Meloni’s demands to take over as finance minister, as discussed in various media outlets over the past two weeks.
Leading Euroskeptic politicians such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, France’s far-right politician Marine Le Pen and Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki were among the first to congratulate Meloni as soon as the first results of the vote were announced overnight.
Combined door-to-door transport via rail, road and waterways is the future of sustainable commercial transport in Europe. This intelligent and seamless linking of the three classic modes of transport can reduce greenhouse gas emissions – compared to full long-distance transport by truck – by up to 90 percent and increase energy efficiency by up to 70 percent.
Due to these benefits, intermodal freight transport can make a decisive contribution to achieving the EU’s ambitious climate targets and reducing CO2 emissions by 55 percent by 2030. One key reason is that intermodal transport does not require the goods themselves to be reloaded. Instead, only the loading unit (container, swap body or semi-trailer) changes transport mode: for example, from the short-haul truck to the climate-friendly long-haul rail link and back again.
This enormous potential of combined door-to-door freight transport is not a distant dream of the future but lived practice. For example, since September 12, 2022, there has been a continuous rail connection of more than 2,000 kilometers from the Barcelona intermodal terminal via Duisburg to Poland to the Poznań and Łódź transshipment terminals there and back again, three times a week.
Combined freight transports have been running for longer and even more frequently between Luxembourg and Le Boulou in southern France (25 times a week), Trieste (twelve times), Lyon (six times), Antwerp, Kiel and Rostock (three times), and Valenton (once). The freight train to Le Boulou alone is up to 850 meters long and transports up to 60 semi-trailers. Today, almost 90 percent of intermodal freight trains already cross at least one border, covering an average of around 920 kilometers. This makes combined transport the dominant form of long-distance cross-border freight transport in Europe.
An important time to decisively advance intermodal freight transport is the EU negotiations currently underway to revise the regulation on guidelines for the development of a trans-European transport network (TEN-T). Since, according to the Green Deal, the market share of rail freight transport is to double by 2050, the infrastructure required for this must function much better than it does at present.
Against this backdrop, we welcome the EU Commission’s plans to adapt the rail infrastructure accordingly. The plans include:
In order to realize these plans, it is necessary that the EU member states and the European Parliament support this expansion of the transport infrastructure planned by the European Commission in favor of intermodal freight transport. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case in the past.
Although the shift of freight transport from road to rail has been a clear political goal of the European Union since 2001, the market share of road freight transport has since risen to around 76 percent – around half of this in long-distance freight transport. With the unfortunate consequence that the transport segment has increased its CO2 emissions – the only European industry to do so. If the EU wants to achieve its energy and climate targets, this trend must not only be stopped but reversed.
Here, the EU could take its cue from a current regulation issued by the German government: The Energy Security Transport Ordinance (EnSiTrV), published in mid-September, gives absolute priority to freight trains transporting coal, oil and liquefied gas in rail transport in order to use these “energy trains” to make up for the supply gap created by the loss of Russian pipeline gas. Numerous intermodal freight trains are also currently operating in Germany as “energy trains” by carrying liquefied gas in tank containers, for example. It would therefore be an important step if the EU also recognized intermodal freight trains as “energy trains” and gave them priority on the rail network.
Conclusion: Combined door-to-door transport is a doubly positive influencing factor for the realization of the EU decisions to curb global warming. On the one hand, it makes it possible to shift freight transport to energy-efficient and low CO2 means of transport and, on the other hand, to significantly reduce the consumption of diesel in freight transport and logistics. Additionally, intermodal transport relieves congested roads and residents, increasing labor efficiency, as one train driver can replace up to 50 truck drivers in long-distance transport. And intermodal transport creates jobs with high added value as well as an appropriate work-life balance in every link of the transport chain.
