No, Ursula von der Leyen will not let the cat out of the bag today as to whether she will seek a second term as Commission President. In her State of the European Union address, she will list what she has achieved with this Commission over the past four years, and she will say “what her priorities are for the way ahead”, as one senior Commission official puts it.
Will this path end after next year’s European elections? In Strasbourg, people don’t quite believe it: “I assume that she will give a speech where she looks to the future, which projects she wants to realize, and that she won’t draw up a résumé”, says Daniel Caspary, head of the EPP group in the European Parliament.
At least among the German population, however, support does not appear to be particularly strong: In a representative Civey survey commissioned by Table.Media, only one in four was in favor of a second term for von der Leyen. Sixty percent of the roughly 2,500 respondents rejected it, with only eight percent supporting a renewed candidacy “under no circumstances”.
In other member states, von der Leyen enjoys a higher reputation than at home. She has also earned a great deal of respect among heads of state and government and in the European Parliament through decisive action.
In her SOTEU speech, the 64-year-old will address the main points her own party family wants to hear from her – on better conditions for European industry, on the practical implementation of the Green Deal and on farmers’ concerns. She will address the long-term task of migration, according to the senior Commission official, and also the need to prepare the EU to welcome more member states.
But the speech could also contain a bombshell, at least from the German automobile industry’s point of view. It will say, the Commission official said, what it thinks needs to be done with regard to electric cars “to ensure that we achieve our ambitious targets and, at the same time, that this industry is exposed to fair competition and not unfair competition from trading partners”.
France has been calling for anti-dumping duties for Chinese manufacturers for months, but German carmakers are strictly opposed to this – they fear retaliatory measures by Beijing in particular.
After 9 o’clock, we will know more.
The EU Commission has presented a package of measures to ease the burden on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), on the eve of the State of the European Union address by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. It contains two legislative proposals:
The Commission wants to make it easier for smaller companies to expand into other EU countries by creating a new tax regime: the Head Office Tax System – HOT. Under the proposal, SMEs can choose to file a tax return only in the country where they have their headquarters. The tax office responsible there would then forward the return to the authorities in the other member states where the company has a permanent establishment. The tax office would then also forward the tax revenues to the countries where they are located.
This would save smaller companies from having to deal with different tax regimes and authorities and possibly being taxed twice. According to the Commission, SMEs spend an average of 2.5 percent of their turnover to meet their tax obligations administratively.
The Commission has identified the low payment behavior of customers as a further burden, particularly for SMEs. These are often larger companies, against which SMEs have little recourse. A revision of the Late Payments Directive is intended to remedy the situation. The previous directive had been of little help here because many states had still given debtors a lot of leeway, according to the Commission.
The authority is now relying on a regulation that will mean full harmonization of the rules in the Internal Market. In the future, a hard deadline of 30 days is to apply to commercial transactions. The previous exceptions, which allow periods of 60 days, will be largely abolished. However, the Director General of the industry association Business Europe, Markus Beyrer, warned that contractual freedom must be preserved.
In addition to the two legislative proposals, organizational measures will also be taken:
SME representative: The Commission now wants to appoint an envoy for SMEs, as has long been announced. This will be a full-time position, said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton. They will report directly to von der Leyen and Breton. In addition, the appointee will attend meetings of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, an expert body that internally reviews the quality of the agency’s impact assessments.
The SME test for new legislative proposals is also to be applied more stringently than before. “Now it is a question of the Commission also appointing the SME representative quickly”, said EPP MEP Jens Gieseke. But that seems doubtful: there is no one in mind for the task yet, said Breton.
Technical solutions: A new system – the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS) – is designed to prevent companies from having to submit the same documents to authorities more than once in the future. It is to be ready for use by the end of the year, as part of the Single Digital Gateway e-government project. In addition, employers will be able to submit the A1 certificate for posted female employees electronically.
Fewer reporting obligations: Von der Leyen announced in March that companies would be relieved of a quarter of the reporting obligations imposed by EU law. The package presented yesterday does not yet contain any concrete proposals, but the Commission announced that it would submit proposals in October. The Secretariat General is currently collecting and evaluating proposals from the Directorates General, said Breton. According to the Commission, in view of inflation, the threshold values in the accounting directives could be raised, which would remove a number of companies from the scope of application.
One-in-one-out: Von der Leyen had promised early in her term of office that for every additional burden imposed by EU regulation, a corresponding relief would be created. The Commission now claims to have achieved a net relief of €7.3 billion in the first full year of application as a result. However, Breton was unable to provide concrete examples when asked.
SME definition: The current EU definition of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises is to be reviewed by the end of the year. Currently, companies with fewer than 250 employees and no more than €50 million in annual sales are considered SMEs. German business has long called for the thresholds to be raised so that more companies can benefit from SME funding. According to the Commission, more than €200 billion in funding is available for SMEs in the current financial period until 2027.
The DIHK criticized that the relief package did not look like a big hit at first glance and was too late overall. After von der Leyen’s announcement, SMEs had expected quick and noticeable relief, but even a whole year later this is not to be found.
Anyone who wants to use the ChatGPT AI system for their business in the near future could be severely thwarted by the planned AI Act. “If things go really badly with the legislation, then a simple customer dialog using a chatbot will entail a boatload of documentation and information requirements that will stifle any innovation”, says Aljoscha Burchardt, Principal Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin.
In May, 150 heads of European tech companies warned against the law in an open letter. In its current form, they said, it jeopardizes Europe’s AI future: it imposes enormous liability risks and compliance costs on business, forces the outsourcing of innovative parts of companies to countries outside the EU, and scares off investors. The problem persists.
“Europe missed out on a lot when it came to the Internet, and we can’t let that happen again with AI”, warns Gerard de Melo, a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam. To keep the best minds and startup founders on the continent, he says, a flexible legal framework is important. “The US as the world champion of AI, Europe as the world champion of AI regulation”, quotes Philipp Hacker, a legal scholar at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), a mocker. “The danger is real, but we should and can avert it.”
There are still a good three months to optimize the AI Act. At the beginning of June, the European Parliament adopted its position on the Act. Since then, the text has been coordinated in a trilogue with the EU Commission and the member states. The aim is to reach an agreement by the end of the year so that the legislation can officially come into force at the beginning of the new year. Companies will then have around two years to adapt to the new framework. The law will then also apply in practice.
What changes are important now? Jörg Bienert, president of the German AI Association, first advocates a narrower definition of AI: “Currently, virtually any software falls under the term, which burdens its development and application with many new regulations.” The same goes for classifying basic models like ChatGPT as high-risk applications, he said. The models are as good as the data they are regularly re-trained with. “But if that entails a jumble of red tape every time, as is typical for high-risk applications, the innovation lean wears off.”
For the AI law, this also means that basic models should only be classified as high-risk if they are used for appropriately sensitive activities – and not merely for designing birthday cards or for organizing a doctor’s practice.
DFKI researcher Aljoscha Burchardt advocates lean, agile regulation: “The law should not list all the problems that could happen. But it should make sure that if something happens, if AI actually causes problems, we’re standing toe to toe.”
Germany’s performance in the global AI race will not be determined solely by legal issues. “We have a good basis in AI research”, says Bienert, “but we lack the practical transfer, courage and willingness to invest, that are the prerequisites for disruptive developments à la ChatGPT.” The potential of AI is enormous, he says, and ranges from new products and services to the upheaval of the entire labor market.
This potential could be exploited with the help of a high-performance AI computing center where, among other things, large, trustworthy basic models made in Germany could be trained. Bienert: “For the new center, we need government investment of €300 to €400 million, which is modest compared to the €10 billion for Intel. The investment is certainly justified, he says, after all, the digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe is at stake.
It is doubtful whether Google, Microsoft and others will be able to catch up. However, special applications, such as those for medicine, administration or industry, which are based on data that is not available to European and overseas big tech companies, look promising at first glance. “I see great opportunities for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises here”, says Philipp Hacker. SMEs are often the innovation drivers in the AI field and deserve massive public support, he adds.
In the end, the crucial factor is an innovation-friendly, non-bureaucratic AI ecosystem, says Gerard de Melo. “Because that exists in the US and Canada, that’s where the startup-hungry AI world is primarily going today.” To make Europe more attractive to the choosy clientele, he says, there are many screws to turn. One of them is being turned the next few weeks: the AI Act.
Ms. Beer, the European Commission only presented its draft in March, and shortly after the summer break, Parliament is now voting on its negotiating mandate – an enormous pace.
On the one hand, of course, this is due to the urgency. In recent years, many of us have repeatedly pointed out that it is not good to build up one-sided dependencies on raw material imports and that we need to diversify. In this respect, none of our colleagues had to be convinced that the issue should be dealt with extremely quickly. Everyone went along with it. There was a corresponding agreement among the group chairmen in the Conference of Presidents. I’m a little proud that this not only went so quickly, but that we even had a single vote in the leading committee with such broad support across all the groups.
When Parliament drafted the own-initiative report on the supply of critical raw materials in 2021, wide rifts opened up between individual groups, particularly on the subject of mining in Europe. Were you and the Renew Group in a good position to mediate?
Yes, I think that certainly helped. It was clear that at some points the EPP and the Greens in particular have a further way to go. It worked well to make proposals from the middle and to show where there are red lines for the individual groups. We saw the opposite example in the Development Committee. Once again, there was such a clash over the contrast between the “overriding public interest” of raw materials projects and the principle of “free, prior and informed consent” of the local population that in the end there was no opinion from the committee at all. It will now be the task for the plenary session to prevent such a thing from happening if possible.
Could Thursday’s vote fail on issues like this?
I am curious to see whether the wisdom and assertiveness of the individual shadow rapporteurs in their own groups will mean that we do not end up in such a situation for the vote on Thursday. However, in view of the personalities with whom I have worked, I am in good spirits.
After the plenary vote, the trilogue negotiations will begin. The Spanish Council Presidency wants to conclude these by the end of the year. On which points will the negotiations with the Council be difficult?
I think there are two points there. These are the issues of acceleration and the overall reduction of bureaucracy, which we have worked hard to achieve. The idea behind the bill is to put strategic projects on a fast track, so to speak, especially in the approval process, making procedures quick and straightforward. Up to now, such projects have often taken 10 to 20 years to be approved.
And we would like to avoid that as far as possible, not only from the point of view of urgency, but also from the point of view of costs for companies and planning security. In its General Approach, the Council has rather tried to water down the Commission’s approach, while we have once again accelerated and, in particular, simplified precisely this approach.
What exactly do you foresee for this in the report?
We have scheduled several measures. The list of strategic raw materials is to be updated more frequently and ad hoc updates are also to be possible. We have shortened some of the deadlines, and applicants are to have a competent contact person, a file officer, as part of the One Stop Shops, i.e. the bundled responsibility in the member states. If the deadlines are not met, if there is no feedback from the authority, then the application is to be considered approved. And in certain cases, there is a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of the applicant, i.e. at the expense of the authority.
We believe that this can be justified because we are talking about a few selected strategic projects. An authority structure should then also set itself up appropriately and bundle all the know-how relating to this approval in one place.
And what does the Council want?
Among other things, the member states want to remove the environmental impact assessment from the specified duration of an approval process. Since there is almost no project where this assessment does not have to be carried out, the proposed deadline would basically be invalid. That is why we have included the assessment in the time limit and made it quite clear that once the time limit has expired, the project is deemed to have been approved.
The approval process should take no longer than 24 months for mining projects, and only 12 months for processing and recycling projects. Doesn’t that mean a massive threat to environmental protection in Europe?
No, because we don’t approach the laws that need to be complied with. We do not touch the Natura 2000 regulation, for example. But we do want the opportunities for raw material projects, which are also located in these protected areas according to the legal situation, not to be dragged out over time. Instead, we want them to be made possible within this manageable timeframe of 24 months, provided that environmental legislation is complied with.
Up to now, many companies, for example, have not even set out to push such approvals further because it has simply been dragged out over the timeline accordingly. This acceleration is certainly a challenge for the various administrations in the member states, which is where the resistance comes from.
In your report, you also sharpen the benchmarks for building recycling capacities, set raw material-specific targets and want to recover raw materials from waste as well. Will the Council follow suit here?
We have set other priorities for the benchmarks and, above all, introduced completely new aspects with the question of innovation along the value chain. This will certainly be another discussion with the Council, but I believe that we have innovative approaches here. Firstly, because the development of alternative materials and production methods can mean that certain raw materials that are now still on the lists no longer need to be mined or obtained in other ways.
And secondly, a stronger focus on recycling, especially of waste from previous mining projects, can prevent additional mining measures and corresponding interventions. That is why we believe that we are making the better proposals for the benchmarks.
No, Ursula von der Leyen will not let the cat out of the bag today as to whether she will seek a second term as Commission President. In her State of the European Union address, she will list what she has achieved with this Commission over the past four years, and she will say “what her priorities are for the way ahead”, as one senior Commission official puts it.
Will this path end after next year’s European elections? In Strasbourg, people don’t quite believe it: “I assume that she will give a speech where she looks to the future, which projects she wants to realize, and that she won’t draw up a résumé”, says Daniel Caspary, head of the EPP group in the European Parliament.
At least among the German population, however, support does not appear to be particularly strong: In a representative Civey survey commissioned by Table.Media, only one in four was in favor of a second term for von der Leyen. Sixty percent of the roughly 2,500 respondents rejected it, with only eight percent supporting a renewed candidacy “under no circumstances”.
In other member states, von der Leyen enjoys a higher reputation than at home. She has also earned a great deal of respect among heads of state and government and in the European Parliament through decisive action.
In her SOTEU speech, the 64-year-old will address the main points her own party family wants to hear from her – on better conditions for European industry, on the practical implementation of the Green Deal and on farmers’ concerns. She will address the long-term task of migration, according to the senior Commission official, and also the need to prepare the EU to welcome more member states.
But the speech could also contain a bombshell, at least from the German automobile industry’s point of view. It will say, the Commission official said, what it thinks needs to be done with regard to electric cars “to ensure that we achieve our ambitious targets and, at the same time, that this industry is exposed to fair competition and not unfair competition from trading partners”.
France has been calling for anti-dumping duties for Chinese manufacturers for months, but German carmakers are strictly opposed to this – they fear retaliatory measures by Beijing in particular.
After 9 o’clock, we will know more.
The EU Commission has presented a package of measures to ease the burden on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), on the eve of the State of the European Union address by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. It contains two legislative proposals:
The Commission wants to make it easier for smaller companies to expand into other EU countries by creating a new tax regime: the Head Office Tax System – HOT. Under the proposal, SMEs can choose to file a tax return only in the country where they have their headquarters. The tax office responsible there would then forward the return to the authorities in the other member states where the company has a permanent establishment. The tax office would then also forward the tax revenues to the countries where they are located.
This would save smaller companies from having to deal with different tax regimes and authorities and possibly being taxed twice. According to the Commission, SMEs spend an average of 2.5 percent of their turnover to meet their tax obligations administratively.
The Commission has identified the low payment behavior of customers as a further burden, particularly for SMEs. These are often larger companies, against which SMEs have little recourse. A revision of the Late Payments Directive is intended to remedy the situation. The previous directive had been of little help here because many states had still given debtors a lot of leeway, according to the Commission.
The authority is now relying on a regulation that will mean full harmonization of the rules in the Internal Market. In the future, a hard deadline of 30 days is to apply to commercial transactions. The previous exceptions, which allow periods of 60 days, will be largely abolished. However, the Director General of the industry association Business Europe, Markus Beyrer, warned that contractual freedom must be preserved.
In addition to the two legislative proposals, organizational measures will also be taken:
SME representative: The Commission now wants to appoint an envoy for SMEs, as has long been announced. This will be a full-time position, said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton. They will report directly to von der Leyen and Breton. In addition, the appointee will attend meetings of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, an expert body that internally reviews the quality of the agency’s impact assessments.
The SME test for new legislative proposals is also to be applied more stringently than before. “Now it is a question of the Commission also appointing the SME representative quickly”, said EPP MEP Jens Gieseke. But that seems doubtful: there is no one in mind for the task yet, said Breton.
Technical solutions: A new system – the Once-Only Technical System (OOTS) – is designed to prevent companies from having to submit the same documents to authorities more than once in the future. It is to be ready for use by the end of the year, as part of the Single Digital Gateway e-government project. In addition, employers will be able to submit the A1 certificate for posted female employees electronically.
Fewer reporting obligations: Von der Leyen announced in March that companies would be relieved of a quarter of the reporting obligations imposed by EU law. The package presented yesterday does not yet contain any concrete proposals, but the Commission announced that it would submit proposals in October. The Secretariat General is currently collecting and evaluating proposals from the Directorates General, said Breton. According to the Commission, in view of inflation, the threshold values in the accounting directives could be raised, which would remove a number of companies from the scope of application.
One-in-one-out: Von der Leyen had promised early in her term of office that for every additional burden imposed by EU regulation, a corresponding relief would be created. The Commission now claims to have achieved a net relief of €7.3 billion in the first full year of application as a result. However, Breton was unable to provide concrete examples when asked.
SME definition: The current EU definition of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises is to be reviewed by the end of the year. Currently, companies with fewer than 250 employees and no more than €50 million in annual sales are considered SMEs. German business has long called for the thresholds to be raised so that more companies can benefit from SME funding. According to the Commission, more than €200 billion in funding is available for SMEs in the current financial period until 2027.
The DIHK criticized that the relief package did not look like a big hit at first glance and was too late overall. After von der Leyen’s announcement, SMEs had expected quick and noticeable relief, but even a whole year later this is not to be found.
Anyone who wants to use the ChatGPT AI system for their business in the near future could be severely thwarted by the planned AI Act. “If things go really badly with the legislation, then a simple customer dialog using a chatbot will entail a boatload of documentation and information requirements that will stifle any innovation”, says Aljoscha Burchardt, Principal Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin.
In May, 150 heads of European tech companies warned against the law in an open letter. In its current form, they said, it jeopardizes Europe’s AI future: it imposes enormous liability risks and compliance costs on business, forces the outsourcing of innovative parts of companies to countries outside the EU, and scares off investors. The problem persists.
“Europe missed out on a lot when it came to the Internet, and we can’t let that happen again with AI”, warns Gerard de Melo, a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam. To keep the best minds and startup founders on the continent, he says, a flexible legal framework is important. “The US as the world champion of AI, Europe as the world champion of AI regulation”, quotes Philipp Hacker, a legal scholar at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), a mocker. “The danger is real, but we should and can avert it.”
There are still a good three months to optimize the AI Act. At the beginning of June, the European Parliament adopted its position on the Act. Since then, the text has been coordinated in a trilogue with the EU Commission and the member states. The aim is to reach an agreement by the end of the year so that the legislation can officially come into force at the beginning of the new year. Companies will then have around two years to adapt to the new framework. The law will then also apply in practice.
What changes are important now? Jörg Bienert, president of the German AI Association, first advocates a narrower definition of AI: “Currently, virtually any software falls under the term, which burdens its development and application with many new regulations.” The same goes for classifying basic models like ChatGPT as high-risk applications, he said. The models are as good as the data they are regularly re-trained with. “But if that entails a jumble of red tape every time, as is typical for high-risk applications, the innovation lean wears off.”
For the AI law, this also means that basic models should only be classified as high-risk if they are used for appropriately sensitive activities – and not merely for designing birthday cards or for organizing a doctor’s practice.
DFKI researcher Aljoscha Burchardt advocates lean, agile regulation: “The law should not list all the problems that could happen. But it should make sure that if something happens, if AI actually causes problems, we’re standing toe to toe.”
Germany’s performance in the global AI race will not be determined solely by legal issues. “We have a good basis in AI research”, says Bienert, “but we lack the practical transfer, courage and willingness to invest, that are the prerequisites for disruptive developments à la ChatGPT.” The potential of AI is enormous, he says, and ranges from new products and services to the upheaval of the entire labor market.
This potential could be exploited with the help of a high-performance AI computing center where, among other things, large, trustworthy basic models made in Germany could be trained. Bienert: “For the new center, we need government investment of €300 to €400 million, which is modest compared to the €10 billion for Intel. The investment is certainly justified, he says, after all, the digital sovereignty of Germany and Europe is at stake.
It is doubtful whether Google, Microsoft and others will be able to catch up. However, special applications, such as those for medicine, administration or industry, which are based on data that is not available to European and overseas big tech companies, look promising at first glance. “I see great opportunities for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises here”, says Philipp Hacker. SMEs are often the innovation drivers in the AI field and deserve massive public support, he adds.
In the end, the crucial factor is an innovation-friendly, non-bureaucratic AI ecosystem, says Gerard de Melo. “Because that exists in the US and Canada, that’s where the startup-hungry AI world is primarily going today.” To make Europe more attractive to the choosy clientele, he says, there are many screws to turn. One of them is being turned the next few weeks: the AI Act.
Ms. Beer, the European Commission only presented its draft in March, and shortly after the summer break, Parliament is now voting on its negotiating mandate – an enormous pace.
On the one hand, of course, this is due to the urgency. In recent years, many of us have repeatedly pointed out that it is not good to build up one-sided dependencies on raw material imports and that we need to diversify. In this respect, none of our colleagues had to be convinced that the issue should be dealt with extremely quickly. Everyone went along with it. There was a corresponding agreement among the group chairmen in the Conference of Presidents. I’m a little proud that this not only went so quickly, but that we even had a single vote in the leading committee with such broad support across all the groups.
When Parliament drafted the own-initiative report on the supply of critical raw materials in 2021, wide rifts opened up between individual groups, particularly on the subject of mining in Europe. Were you and the Renew Group in a good position to mediate?
Yes, I think that certainly helped. It was clear that at some points the EPP and the Greens in particular have a further way to go. It worked well to make proposals from the middle and to show where there are red lines for the individual groups. We saw the opposite example in the Development Committee. Once again, there was such a clash over the contrast between the “overriding public interest” of raw materials projects and the principle of “free, prior and informed consent” of the local population that in the end there was no opinion from the committee at all. It will now be the task for the plenary session to prevent such a thing from happening if possible.
Could Thursday’s vote fail on issues like this?
I am curious to see whether the wisdom and assertiveness of the individual shadow rapporteurs in their own groups will mean that we do not end up in such a situation for the vote on Thursday. However, in view of the personalities with whom I have worked, I am in good spirits.
After the plenary vote, the trilogue negotiations will begin. The Spanish Council Presidency wants to conclude these by the end of the year. On which points will the negotiations with the Council be difficult?
I think there are two points there. These are the issues of acceleration and the overall reduction of bureaucracy, which we have worked hard to achieve. The idea behind the bill is to put strategic projects on a fast track, so to speak, especially in the approval process, making procedures quick and straightforward. Up to now, such projects have often taken 10 to 20 years to be approved.
And we would like to avoid that as far as possible, not only from the point of view of urgency, but also from the point of view of costs for companies and planning security. In its General Approach, the Council has rather tried to water down the Commission’s approach, while we have once again accelerated and, in particular, simplified precisely this approach.
What exactly do you foresee for this in the report?
We have scheduled several measures. The list of strategic raw materials is to be updated more frequently and ad hoc updates are also to be possible. We have shortened some of the deadlines, and applicants are to have a competent contact person, a file officer, as part of the One Stop Shops, i.e. the bundled responsibility in the member states. If the deadlines are not met, if there is no feedback from the authority, then the application is to be considered approved. And in certain cases, there is a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of the applicant, i.e. at the expense of the authority.
We believe that this can be justified because we are talking about a few selected strategic projects. An authority structure should then also set itself up appropriately and bundle all the know-how relating to this approval in one place.
And what does the Council want?
Among other things, the member states want to remove the environmental impact assessment from the specified duration of an approval process. Since there is almost no project where this assessment does not have to be carried out, the proposed deadline would basically be invalid. That is why we have included the assessment in the time limit and made it quite clear that once the time limit has expired, the project is deemed to have been approved.
The approval process should take no longer than 24 months for mining projects, and only 12 months for processing and recycling projects. Doesn’t that mean a massive threat to environmental protection in Europe?
No, because we don’t approach the laws that need to be complied with. We do not touch the Natura 2000 regulation, for example. But we do want the opportunities for raw material projects, which are also located in these protected areas according to the legal situation, not to be dragged out over time. Instead, we want them to be made possible within this manageable timeframe of 24 months, provided that environmental legislation is complied with.
Up to now, many companies, for example, have not even set out to push such approvals further because it has simply been dragged out over the timeline accordingly. This acceleration is certainly a challenge for the various administrations in the member states, which is where the resistance comes from.
In your report, you also sharpen the benchmarks for building recycling capacities, set raw material-specific targets and want to recover raw materials from waste as well. Will the Council follow suit here?
We have set other priorities for the benchmarks and, above all, introduced completely new aspects with the question of innovation along the value chain. This will certainly be another discussion with the Council, but I believe that we have innovative approaches here. Firstly, because the development of alternative materials and production methods can mean that certain raw materials that are now still on the lists no longer need to be mined or obtained in other ways.
And secondly, a stronger focus on recycling, especially of waste from previous mining projects, can prevent additional mining measures and corresponding interventions. That is why we believe that we are making the better proposals for the benchmarks.
