The Brief – EU rentrée blues

EU rentrée blues
By Alexandra Brzozowski | @alex_owski

It is a bit slow around Schuman these days, isn’t it? Yet the clock on this European Commission has already started ticking.

The EU summer break also felt longer than usual this year. Walking around the EU’s centre of power in Brussels this week, the author of this Brief couldn’t help noticing the absence of the usual back-to-school buzz of previous years (minus the COVID-19 times, obviously).

For EU foreign policy wonks, the political season already started last week with the informal foreign and defence ministers’ meetings in Toledo, but even there, most scribes, EU officials and diplomats were mostly reminiscing about the relative calm under the scorching Spanish sun.

The steadily escalating sense of foreboding of a laborious and difficult year – until we see the new European Commission sworn in, more or less a year from now – might soon hit the still sleepy Brussels policy crowd like a ton of bricks.

The road there is paved with good (or bad) intentions and an uncertain geopolitical setting.

The number of migrants lodging asylum applications in the EU has jumped 28% in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year, official figures released Tuesday showed.

The Economic Affairs Committee of the European Parliament voiced concerns over the digital euro, including costs for banks and its use by EU citizens, during questions posed to European Central Bank Executive Fabio Panetta on Monday.

The massive development of intermittent renewable energies is set to dramatically increase the need for flexibility in the electricity grid, and market players want increased focus on demand management as a source of grid optimisation.

Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said she was “confident” that France’s requirements under the EU electricity market reform will be met, just weeks before formal negotiations are due to resume following the collapse of talks at the end of June.

The German government appears to have dropped a much-debated idea of cutting diesel subsidies for farmers for now, but the question of what climate-friendly alternatives there are for tractors and other agricultural machinery remains.

The German agriculture ministry is considering starting talks with Brussels on partially exempting grassland farms from rules on fertiliser use, three months after the European Commission closed its nitrate pollution case against Berlin.

The registration of new cars with internal combustion engines running on e-fuels should be allowed after 2035, even if the fuels are not 100% climate neutral, German transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP/Renew Europe) said at an e-fuels conference on Monday.

The European Commission has hinted it might review the high protection status of wolves on the back of increasing tension around the predator in rural areas, but the move has been slammed by environmentalists as a political pandering ahead of upcoming elections.

Iliana Ivanova, Bulgaria’s commissioner-designate for innovation, research, culture, education and youth, successfully sailed through an almost three-hour European Parliament hearing on Tuesday, winning applause from MEPs.

US tech giant Apple, which decided to halt the development of a photo-scanning tool to detect child sexual abuse material last December, has now offered data privacy concerns as the main reason behind the decision.

Last but not least, check out this week’s Transport Brief: Will the promise of CO2-neutral e-fuels hold?

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Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Benjamin Fox]