This Tuesday is likely to be Frans Timmermans’ last working day in Brussels. His Social Democrats and the allied Greens will in all likelihood choose the Vice-President of the EU Commission as their top candidate for the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands on Nov. 22. The party leaders have already nominated the 62-year-old, and the results of the member poll will be presented today.
Timmermans’ candidacy has given the alliance of the PvdA and GroenLinks a strong boost, and it is now ahead in the polls. However, Ursula von der Leyen’s upcoming change of her first deputy during the summer break has caused some headaches.
The Commission President has so far not let her cards show how she intends to redistribute the tasks of “Mister Green Deal”. But when Timmermans is officially nominated as the top candidate and thus leaves his office in abeyance, she will have to put them on the table.
Von der Leyen will probably once again award the high-profile post of Vice-President to a Social Democrat in order to maintain party proportionality. Both her Slovakian deputy Maroš Šefčovič and the former Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni have the necessary seniority.
The personnel puzzle is complicated by the fact that it is still open who the Dutch government will nominate as the new commissioner. Several names are still circulating in The Hague. Who it will be is just as unclear as the portfolio within the Commission.
And with Margrethe Vestager, another of the three EPPs is looking to jump ship to the European Investment Bank. Whether the Dane actually leaves, however, depends on whether she can prevail against the Spanish candidate Nadia Calviño. The decision is to be made in September.
When the Battery Regulation comes into force in February 2024, the first part of the EU’s 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan will become law. The regulation is intended to set standards for a more sustainable design of batteries. It is also intended to boost material cycles and strengthen the European battery and recycling industry. The law covers the entire life cycle of a product for the first time.
Batteries are strategically important for the ramp-up of e-mobility and the achievement of climate targets. But the EU Commission is also planning measures to promote the circular economy for almost all other products on the internal market. For some specific product groups, it has presented its own measures: for example, with the strategy for sustainable and circular textiles or the revision of the Construction Products Regulation and the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive.
In order to give products a more sustainable design, the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council will be negotiating the new Ecodesign Regulation from the end of August. It is intended to replace the previous Ecodesign Directive. Up to now, its requirements have only applied to energy-related products, such as PCs, televisions, ventilation technology, electric motors and household appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Product-specific implementing regulations are in force for 29 product groups on the basis of the directive.
The new regulation is designed to sharpen product design requirements in terms of carbon footprint, environmental footprint, energy efficiency and repairability. And it covers a wider range of products. With the exception of food, feed, pharmaceuticals and living organisms, the requirements will apply to all product groups in the future. The new rules – also because of the more binding nature of a regulation compared to a directive – have the potential to make almost all products on the internal market more environmentally friendly and resource-efficient.
The Council already adopted its position at the end of May, and the EU Parliament decided on its negotiating mandate in July. “This is one of the most important decisions of this legislature,” said Internal Market Committee Chair Anna Cavazzini after the vote in plenary. The regulation will “bring many tangible improvements to the everyday lives of all consumers and the environment”, she said.
The negotiations that are now pending are one of the priorities of the Spanish Council Presidency. The first trialogue, i.e. the first negotiating meeting between the Commission, the Council and the Parliament, is scheduled to take place on Aug. 30. Among the sticking points will be the ban on planned obsolescence and the ban on the destruction of unsold products. The Council was only able to agree on textiles and shoes, while the Parliament is calling for electrical products to be included in the ban.
The Council also wants to exclude motor vehicles from the Ecodesign Regulation. The Commission is planning a separate law for these. Shortly before the summer break, it presented a draft for the revision of the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive. This is to become a regulation that also includes new requirements for circular economy in vehicle design.
With three new directives, some of which overlap, the EU Commission wants to give impetus to the circular economy via consumer protection. They are the directive to strengthen consumers for ecological change, the right to repair, and the green claims directive against greenwashing.
The Consumer Empowerment for Environmental Change Directive is designed to help consumers make greener purchasing decisions. And it is intended to encourage companies to offer more durable and sustainable products. The draft proposes amendments to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. These cover misleading claims about products, the approval of sustainability labels and a ban on limiting product lifespan through product design. Trilogue negotiations on this directive began in June.
The Green Claims Directive presented in March 2023 also targets the moment of purchase decision. Claims about the environmental compatibility of products such as “climate-neutral”, “green” or “sustainable” are often false or misleading. According to the EU Commission’s analysis, for a significant proportion of products it is not clear whether the claim refers to the entire product or only to one component, to the company or only to individual products. Since at the same time a growing number of consumers want to make environmentally conscious purchasing decisions, the EU wants to prohibit this greenwashing with the directive. Corresponding environmental claims must then be verifiable using certification systems.
In addition, as part of the ecodesign requirements, a repair label is to reveal information about the durability and reparability of a product. Plans for such a label have already been adopted for smartphones and tablets.
The directive to promote the repair of goods starts at a later point in the life cycle of a product. It is intended to establish a consumer claim against manufacturers for the repair of products. This aims to extend the service life of products, thus keeping them in the material cycle and reducing resource consumption.
Consumers are to be put in touch with repair businesses more easily in the future through a matchmaking repair platform on the Internet. They will then also be able to request a standard EU-wide repair information form from the business in order to compare offers.
In the lead Internal Market Committee of the EU Parliament, René Repasi (SPD) presented his draft report before the summer break. Amendments can be submitted until the beginning of September. Repasi sharpens the draft, especially with regard to financial and time incentives for repair. It calls, for example, for a reduced VAT rate for products affected by the directive and incentives such as the repair bonus in Austria or Thuringia. Until now, repairing products has often been so expensive that buying new is much more worthwhile.
The plenary vote on the negotiating mandate is planned for November. It would then be possible to conclude negotiations with the Council before the end of this legislative term.
With the new packaging regulation, which is to replace the previous directive, the EU wants to set more binding recycling targets and, for the first time, also regulate waste prevention and reuse, in line with the waste hierarchy. In contrast to the old directive, the regulation is intended to have a real impact on the market, because so far most member states have failed to meet their recycling targets.
However, the disposables lobby has been trying to water down the plans for months – with success: The Commission has already lowered the reusable targets, and the rapporteur in the EU Parliament has deleted certain targets. The vote in the Parliament is scheduled for the beginning of October. It is unclear when and how the subsequent trilogue negotiations will continue.
No medicine, no baby food, no flour, no fuel, and at times no electricity: Videos and eyewitness reports show how catastrophic the humanitarian situation is in the de facto independent region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since December, Azerbaijan has blocked the Lachin corridor to the regular movement of people and goods.
Since June 15, not even aid convoys of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Russian peacekeepers have been allowed to bring urgently needed goods to the approximately 120,000 ethnic Armenians. At least one person has already died as a result of malnutrition, Armenian media report.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague from 2003 to 2012, laid out in a report released in early August that the blockade and its consequences met the criteria of genocide under Article II(c) of the UN Genocide Convention. It is the first time that a high-ranking international expert has explicitly described Azerbaijan’s activity as genocide.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that [Azerbaijan’s] President Aliyev harbors genocidal intentions: he knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily blocked the Lachin Corridor even after being made aware of the consequences of his actions by the International Court of Justice’s preliminary injunction”, the 28-page report says. The International Court of Justice has twice issued legally binding orders to Azerbaijan to lift the blockade.
In response to a question from Table.Media, Ocampo explained: “I want to do my part to prevent the denial of genocide. The responsibility now lies with the 153 States Parties to the Genocide Convention, including Germany. They have a duty to prevent the genocide.”
The German government and the Foreign Office (AA) express “concern” about the unstable situation. “The German government supports and participates in the trilateral peace talks initiated by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and also welcomes corresponding initiatives by the United States”, a spokeswoman for the AA said in response to a question. Concrete steps include support for the Red Cross on the ground and for the EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA).
Calling the blockade genocide, however, is taking it too far, according to government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit: In yesterday’s federal press conference, he said: “These are curse words that, in my view, don’t belong here.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting over the region for decades. In 2020, a war broke out that ended on Nov. 9 with a ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia. The main point of contention is the status of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Following persistent threat rhetoric from Azerbaijan, Armenia’s President Nikol Pashinyan in April signaled a willingness to hand over Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan on the condition that the people receive minority rights.
The agreement also stipulated that the Lachin corridor be kept open. Aliyev justifies the need to establish checkpoints on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border with Armenia’s illegal arms smuggling to Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia denies these accusations.
Azerbaijan also points to a newly built road via Aghdam toward Baku that would be open. However, the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh fear that they will not be allowed to return to their homes if they leave their homeland for Baku, unless they take Azerbaijani citizenship. In this way, Aliyev wants to gradually destroy the ethnic Armenians, according to Armenia’s interpretation.
Pressure on Aliyev is now coming even from close allies such as Israel and Turkey, both arms suppliers to Azerbaijan. The US, which is taking an active mediating role, is delaying the renewal of a long-standing military aid program to Baku in the face of allegations of genocide.
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, the United States, France, Russia, the EU and other states called on Azerbaijan to lift the blockade of the Lachin Corridor. However, the meeting ended without a resolution.
Narek Sukiasyan, a political scientist at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Armenia, expresses disappointment. “If the UN Security Council’s option is exhausted, what is left?” He says the national interests of the West – many EU countries, including Germany, buy cheap gas and hydrogen from Azerbaijan – continue to take precedence over the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Azerbaijan keeps creating new crises with the escalations and brings the peace negotiations of the past months to a standstill”, Sukiasyan says. Even if Aliyev were to lift the blockade of the Lachin Corridor in the near future, this would not resolve the fundamental problems, namely peace between the two countries and the rights of the people in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It has become almost a side note that, last Tuesday, a patrol of the unarmed EU observer mission in Armenia reported that four to five shots were fired about a kilometer away from the patrol. “Although it was not possible to determine the target of the shots, the patrol took the necessary protective measures and left the area”, an EUMA spokeswoman told Table.Media.
EUMA had initially denied the incident via X (formerly Twitter), but then had to admit that EUMA officials “were present at the shooting incident” because of a leaked video. No one was injured.
“Europe is not delivering what people expect from Europe“, Tobias Winkler analyzes soberly. As a Member of Parliament for the CSU, he sits on the EU Committee of the Bundestag. From Berlin, he wants to do his part to change that.
For example, by reforming the institutions, such as reducing the size of the European Commission, enforcing majority voting on foreign policy issues or giving the European Parliament the right of initiative. “When it came to the Ukraine sanctions package, for example, we found agreement relatively quickly on the whole”, he explains. “But Hungary used the need for agreement to push through its own interests.”
In his day-to-day work, the 45-year-old benefits above all from the fact that he himself worked for the European Parliament for 15 years. From 2005 to 2014, he was first the office manager of former Vice President Ingo Friedrich and then of then-President Hans-Gert Pöttering; from 2015 to 2021, he then headed the European Parliament’s liaison office in Munich.
“Especially when it comes to bigger challenges, we always fall very quickly into national solution scenarios“, he has observed. For example: If gas becomes scarce, we first make sure that our own storage facilities are full. When electricity becomes expensive, we support our domestic economy with €200 billion, and in a pandemic, the first thing we do is close our borders.
Even when dealing with Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, German policy initially lacked a European perspective, Winkler says. “Especially in Poland and the Baltic states, which are traditionally very devoted to us, the disappointment was incredibly great when we were initially so hesitant in supporting Ukraine. The Franco-German relationship has also suffered a lot in the last year, mainly due to disrespect.”
Winkler used and still uses his contacts in the various member states to “putty what needs to be puttied” in such situations: by holding talks, explaining the German position, taking up criticism and passing it on.
He appreciates the working environment in Brussels and Strasbourg as dynamic, young and open. In Berlin, on the other hand, he experiences a lot of bureaucracy in the administrations and time and again civil servants “who first have to clarify their responsibilities and are very reluctant to share their knowledge”.
Tobias Winkler openly admits that he never had his sights firmly set on a seat in the Bundestag. Rather, it was only after some initial hesitation that he decided to apply to run for the electoral district 243 (Fürth), which had unexpectedly become vacant. He was convinced by the advice of his political companions, who told him that Berlin probably needed more convinced Europeans than Brussels or Strasbourg.
Tobias Winkler describes not only his relationship with the German bureaucracy as rather distant. In the beginning, this also applied to the CSU. Like his father 30 years earlier, he was asked as a young man to run for the CSU in the market town council because of his volunteer work in sports, without being a member. And like his father 30 years earlier, he said, he accepted and then joined the party only after he was elected. “Of course I had a political mindset, but I didn’t want to be tied down by the outside too early“, explains Winkler, who studied political sciences in Munich.
Back then, he says, he liked the members and the program of the local association. Today, 20 years later, he is in a position where he can make a small contribution to shaping the party, especially through his enthusiasm for Europe. He enjoys the fact that he has a certain independence as a direct candidate.
When Winkler is not in the German capital, he lives with his wife and daughter as well as a horse, chickens and rabbits in the Franconian town of Roßtal in the Fürth district. There, he is also on the board of the “Marktplatz-Kärwaburschen” (Editor’s note: “Marktplatz-Kirchweihburschen” in a Bavarian accent, lit. “town square parish fair lads”), which cultivates local customs.
“My wife and daughter take care of the animals, and I’m more responsible for building and repairing stables and fences”, he says. He also planted a meadow orchard on his own property as a contribution to nature conservation, long before it was en vogue. “We wanted to use it to give nature some space again after a 100-year-old meadow orchard had been converted into a cornfield in front of our house.” Janna Degener-Storr
This Tuesday is likely to be Frans Timmermans’ last working day in Brussels. His Social Democrats and the allied Greens will in all likelihood choose the Vice-President of the EU Commission as their top candidate for the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands on Nov. 22. The party leaders have already nominated the 62-year-old, and the results of the member poll will be presented today.
Timmermans’ candidacy has given the alliance of the PvdA and GroenLinks a strong boost, and it is now ahead in the polls. However, Ursula von der Leyen’s upcoming change of her first deputy during the summer break has caused some headaches.
The Commission President has so far not let her cards show how she intends to redistribute the tasks of “Mister Green Deal”. But when Timmermans is officially nominated as the top candidate and thus leaves his office in abeyance, she will have to put them on the table.
Von der Leyen will probably once again award the high-profile post of Vice-President to a Social Democrat in order to maintain party proportionality. Both her Slovakian deputy Maroš Šefčovič and the former Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni have the necessary seniority.
The personnel puzzle is complicated by the fact that it is still open who the Dutch government will nominate as the new commissioner. Several names are still circulating in The Hague. Who it will be is just as unclear as the portfolio within the Commission.
And with Margrethe Vestager, another of the three EPPs is looking to jump ship to the European Investment Bank. Whether the Dane actually leaves, however, depends on whether she can prevail against the Spanish candidate Nadia Calviño. The decision is to be made in September.
When the Battery Regulation comes into force in February 2024, the first part of the EU’s 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan will become law. The regulation is intended to set standards for a more sustainable design of batteries. It is also intended to boost material cycles and strengthen the European battery and recycling industry. The law covers the entire life cycle of a product for the first time.
Batteries are strategically important for the ramp-up of e-mobility and the achievement of climate targets. But the EU Commission is also planning measures to promote the circular economy for almost all other products on the internal market. For some specific product groups, it has presented its own measures: for example, with the strategy for sustainable and circular textiles or the revision of the Construction Products Regulation and the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive.
In order to give products a more sustainable design, the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council will be negotiating the new Ecodesign Regulation from the end of August. It is intended to replace the previous Ecodesign Directive. Up to now, its requirements have only applied to energy-related products, such as PCs, televisions, ventilation technology, electric motors and household appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Product-specific implementing regulations are in force for 29 product groups on the basis of the directive.
The new regulation is designed to sharpen product design requirements in terms of carbon footprint, environmental footprint, energy efficiency and repairability. And it covers a wider range of products. With the exception of food, feed, pharmaceuticals and living organisms, the requirements will apply to all product groups in the future. The new rules – also because of the more binding nature of a regulation compared to a directive – have the potential to make almost all products on the internal market more environmentally friendly and resource-efficient.
The Council already adopted its position at the end of May, and the EU Parliament decided on its negotiating mandate in July. “This is one of the most important decisions of this legislature,” said Internal Market Committee Chair Anna Cavazzini after the vote in plenary. The regulation will “bring many tangible improvements to the everyday lives of all consumers and the environment”, she said.
The negotiations that are now pending are one of the priorities of the Spanish Council Presidency. The first trialogue, i.e. the first negotiating meeting between the Commission, the Council and the Parliament, is scheduled to take place on Aug. 30. Among the sticking points will be the ban on planned obsolescence and the ban on the destruction of unsold products. The Council was only able to agree on textiles and shoes, while the Parliament is calling for electrical products to be included in the ban.
The Council also wants to exclude motor vehicles from the Ecodesign Regulation. The Commission is planning a separate law for these. Shortly before the summer break, it presented a draft for the revision of the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive. This is to become a regulation that also includes new requirements for circular economy in vehicle design.
With three new directives, some of which overlap, the EU Commission wants to give impetus to the circular economy via consumer protection. They are the directive to strengthen consumers for ecological change, the right to repair, and the green claims directive against greenwashing.
The Consumer Empowerment for Environmental Change Directive is designed to help consumers make greener purchasing decisions. And it is intended to encourage companies to offer more durable and sustainable products. The draft proposes amendments to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. These cover misleading claims about products, the approval of sustainability labels and a ban on limiting product lifespan through product design. Trilogue negotiations on this directive began in June.
The Green Claims Directive presented in March 2023 also targets the moment of purchase decision. Claims about the environmental compatibility of products such as “climate-neutral”, “green” or “sustainable” are often false or misleading. According to the EU Commission’s analysis, for a significant proportion of products it is not clear whether the claim refers to the entire product or only to one component, to the company or only to individual products. Since at the same time a growing number of consumers want to make environmentally conscious purchasing decisions, the EU wants to prohibit this greenwashing with the directive. Corresponding environmental claims must then be verifiable using certification systems.
In addition, as part of the ecodesign requirements, a repair label is to reveal information about the durability and reparability of a product. Plans for such a label have already been adopted for smartphones and tablets.
The directive to promote the repair of goods starts at a later point in the life cycle of a product. It is intended to establish a consumer claim against manufacturers for the repair of products. This aims to extend the service life of products, thus keeping them in the material cycle and reducing resource consumption.
Consumers are to be put in touch with repair businesses more easily in the future through a matchmaking repair platform on the Internet. They will then also be able to request a standard EU-wide repair information form from the business in order to compare offers.
In the lead Internal Market Committee of the EU Parliament, René Repasi (SPD) presented his draft report before the summer break. Amendments can be submitted until the beginning of September. Repasi sharpens the draft, especially with regard to financial and time incentives for repair. It calls, for example, for a reduced VAT rate for products affected by the directive and incentives such as the repair bonus in Austria or Thuringia. Until now, repairing products has often been so expensive that buying new is much more worthwhile.
The plenary vote on the negotiating mandate is planned for November. It would then be possible to conclude negotiations with the Council before the end of this legislative term.
With the new packaging regulation, which is to replace the previous directive, the EU wants to set more binding recycling targets and, for the first time, also regulate waste prevention and reuse, in line with the waste hierarchy. In contrast to the old directive, the regulation is intended to have a real impact on the market, because so far most member states have failed to meet their recycling targets.
However, the disposables lobby has been trying to water down the plans for months – with success: The Commission has already lowered the reusable targets, and the rapporteur in the EU Parliament has deleted certain targets. The vote in the Parliament is scheduled for the beginning of October. It is unclear when and how the subsequent trilogue negotiations will continue.
No medicine, no baby food, no flour, no fuel, and at times no electricity: Videos and eyewitness reports show how catastrophic the humanitarian situation is in the de facto independent region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since December, Azerbaijan has blocked the Lachin corridor to the regular movement of people and goods.
Since June 15, not even aid convoys of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Russian peacekeepers have been allowed to bring urgently needed goods to the approximately 120,000 ethnic Armenians. At least one person has already died as a result of malnutrition, Armenian media report.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague from 2003 to 2012, laid out in a report released in early August that the blockade and its consequences met the criteria of genocide under Article II(c) of the UN Genocide Convention. It is the first time that a high-ranking international expert has explicitly described Azerbaijan’s activity as genocide.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that [Azerbaijan’s] President Aliyev harbors genocidal intentions: he knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily blocked the Lachin Corridor even after being made aware of the consequences of his actions by the International Court of Justice’s preliminary injunction”, the 28-page report says. The International Court of Justice has twice issued legally binding orders to Azerbaijan to lift the blockade.
In response to a question from Table.Media, Ocampo explained: “I want to do my part to prevent the denial of genocide. The responsibility now lies with the 153 States Parties to the Genocide Convention, including Germany. They have a duty to prevent the genocide.”
The German government and the Foreign Office (AA) express “concern” about the unstable situation. “The German government supports and participates in the trilateral peace talks initiated by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and also welcomes corresponding initiatives by the United States”, a spokeswoman for the AA said in response to a question. Concrete steps include support for the Red Cross on the ground and for the EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA).
Calling the blockade genocide, however, is taking it too far, according to government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit: In yesterday’s federal press conference, he said: “These are curse words that, in my view, don’t belong here.”
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting over the region for decades. In 2020, a war broke out that ended on Nov. 9 with a ceasefire agreement brokered by Russia. The main point of contention is the status of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Following persistent threat rhetoric from Azerbaijan, Armenia’s President Nikol Pashinyan in April signaled a willingness to hand over Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan on the condition that the people receive minority rights.
The agreement also stipulated that the Lachin corridor be kept open. Aliyev justifies the need to establish checkpoints on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border with Armenia’s illegal arms smuggling to Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia denies these accusations.
Azerbaijan also points to a newly built road via Aghdam toward Baku that would be open. However, the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh fear that they will not be allowed to return to their homes if they leave their homeland for Baku, unless they take Azerbaijani citizenship. In this way, Aliyev wants to gradually destroy the ethnic Armenians, according to Armenia’s interpretation.
Pressure on Aliyev is now coming even from close allies such as Israel and Turkey, both arms suppliers to Azerbaijan. The US, which is taking an active mediating role, is delaying the renewal of a long-standing military aid program to Baku in the face of allegations of genocide.
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, the United States, France, Russia, the EU and other states called on Azerbaijan to lift the blockade of the Lachin Corridor. However, the meeting ended without a resolution.
Narek Sukiasyan, a political scientist at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Armenia, expresses disappointment. “If the UN Security Council’s option is exhausted, what is left?” He says the national interests of the West – many EU countries, including Germany, buy cheap gas and hydrogen from Azerbaijan – continue to take precedence over the people of Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Azerbaijan keeps creating new crises with the escalations and brings the peace negotiations of the past months to a standstill”, Sukiasyan says. Even if Aliyev were to lift the blockade of the Lachin Corridor in the near future, this would not resolve the fundamental problems, namely peace between the two countries and the rights of the people in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It has become almost a side note that, last Tuesday, a patrol of the unarmed EU observer mission in Armenia reported that four to five shots were fired about a kilometer away from the patrol. “Although it was not possible to determine the target of the shots, the patrol took the necessary protective measures and left the area”, an EUMA spokeswoman told Table.Media.
EUMA had initially denied the incident via X (formerly Twitter), but then had to admit that EUMA officials “were present at the shooting incident” because of a leaked video. No one was injured.
“Europe is not delivering what people expect from Europe“, Tobias Winkler analyzes soberly. As a Member of Parliament for the CSU, he sits on the EU Committee of the Bundestag. From Berlin, he wants to do his part to change that.
For example, by reforming the institutions, such as reducing the size of the European Commission, enforcing majority voting on foreign policy issues or giving the European Parliament the right of initiative. “When it came to the Ukraine sanctions package, for example, we found agreement relatively quickly on the whole”, he explains. “But Hungary used the need for agreement to push through its own interests.”
In his day-to-day work, the 45-year-old benefits above all from the fact that he himself worked for the European Parliament for 15 years. From 2005 to 2014, he was first the office manager of former Vice President Ingo Friedrich and then of then-President Hans-Gert Pöttering; from 2015 to 2021, he then headed the European Parliament’s liaison office in Munich.
“Especially when it comes to bigger challenges, we always fall very quickly into national solution scenarios“, he has observed. For example: If gas becomes scarce, we first make sure that our own storage facilities are full. When electricity becomes expensive, we support our domestic economy with €200 billion, and in a pandemic, the first thing we do is close our borders.
Even when dealing with Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, German policy initially lacked a European perspective, Winkler says. “Especially in Poland and the Baltic states, which are traditionally very devoted to us, the disappointment was incredibly great when we were initially so hesitant in supporting Ukraine. The Franco-German relationship has also suffered a lot in the last year, mainly due to disrespect.”
Winkler used and still uses his contacts in the various member states to “putty what needs to be puttied” in such situations: by holding talks, explaining the German position, taking up criticism and passing it on.
He appreciates the working environment in Brussels and Strasbourg as dynamic, young and open. In Berlin, on the other hand, he experiences a lot of bureaucracy in the administrations and time and again civil servants “who first have to clarify their responsibilities and are very reluctant to share their knowledge”.
Tobias Winkler openly admits that he never had his sights firmly set on a seat in the Bundestag. Rather, it was only after some initial hesitation that he decided to apply to run for the electoral district 243 (Fürth), which had unexpectedly become vacant. He was convinced by the advice of his political companions, who told him that Berlin probably needed more convinced Europeans than Brussels or Strasbourg.
Tobias Winkler describes not only his relationship with the German bureaucracy as rather distant. In the beginning, this also applied to the CSU. Like his father 30 years earlier, he was asked as a young man to run for the CSU in the market town council because of his volunteer work in sports, without being a member. And like his father 30 years earlier, he said, he accepted and then joined the party only after he was elected. “Of course I had a political mindset, but I didn’t want to be tied down by the outside too early“, explains Winkler, who studied political sciences in Munich.
Back then, he says, he liked the members and the program of the local association. Today, 20 years later, he is in a position where he can make a small contribution to shaping the party, especially through his enthusiasm for Europe. He enjoys the fact that he has a certain independence as a direct candidate.
When Winkler is not in the German capital, he lives with his wife and daughter as well as a horse, chickens and rabbits in the Franconian town of Roßtal in the Fürth district. There, he is also on the board of the “Marktplatz-Kärwaburschen” (Editor’s note: “Marktplatz-Kirchweihburschen” in a Bavarian accent, lit. “town square parish fair lads”), which cultivates local customs.
“My wife and daughter take care of the animals, and I’m more responsible for building and repairing stables and fences”, he says. He also planted a meadow orchard on his own property as a contribution to nature conservation, long before it was en vogue. “We wanted to use it to give nature some space again after a 100-year-old meadow orchard had been converted into a cornfield in front of our house.” Janna Degener-Storr
