How to make sense of Brussels’ new tangled commission web

Good morning. A scoop to start: The EU’s outgoing competition chief Margrethe Vestager has warned an overhaul of the bloc’s merger rules would open a “Pandora’s box”, in a sideswipe at plans for her newly-announced successor to rethink the bloc’s antitrust regulations.

Today, the EU’s Dutch commissioner gives us his take on the new-look commission announced yesterday, and our Berlin team reports on Friedrich Merz finally announcing his bid to be the next German chancellor.

Spider’s web

Linking up, going hand-in-hand: that is the key change in the new European Commission announced yesterday, according to the (re)minted Dutch commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, write Alice Hancock and Andy Bounds.

Context: Ursula von der Leyen announced the names and portfolios of her new commissioners yesterday, lining up six executive vice-presidents overseeing 20 commissioners — many with overlapping responsibilities. Our friends at Politico have made a handy chart.

Hoekstra, a member of von der Leyen’s centre-right European People’s party, has proved himself a loyal foot soldier for the European Commission president. He was rewarded with a second term as climate, net zero and clean growth commissioner.

The former Dutch finance minister, who will also have responsibility for taxation, will report to two executive vice-presidents, the Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera in charge of competitiveness and the French liberal Stéphane Séjourné, who will head up industrial policy.

The tangle of political allegiances should not be a problem, Hoekstra said: “I come from a country where working together across party lines is essential.”

“My view has always been that our job is to fix the large problems for Europeans, and they don’t care at all about small politics and the things unfortunately we preoccupy ourselves with too much. They care about delivery.”

That means intertwining climate policy “much more firmly together with the whole domain of the economy, industry, innovation [and] tax”, Hoekstra said. “That is the step change, that is the watershed element in the approach of this commission.”

But that means multiple commissioners have more than one boss, and policy areas such as sustainability are split among various fiefdoms.

“It’s more complicated in the sense that you have a lot of cross-links . . . but it actually reflects the reality that we need to have policies that are overall co-ordinated,” a senior commission official said.

More sceptical observers noted that the overlaps were to von der Leyen’s advantage, given that they strengthen her role as the ultimate decision maker.

One EU diplomat noted that while she had given big European countries vice-president posts, she had installed “loyal henchmen” such as Hoekstra under them to oversee the “meaty bits” of policy implementation.

Chart du jour: Hot and cold

Although air conditioning accounts for 4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, consumers are increasingly opting for it, writes Lex.

Worthy opponents

When Friedrich Merz finally announced he was running as the centre-right chancellor candidate in Germany’s national election next year, Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats breathed a sigh of relief, write Guy Chazan and Gideon Rachman.

Context: The SPD, which is currently polling at just 15 per cent, way behind Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) on 33 per cent, has little chance of winning the Bundestag election scheduled for September next year. But many in the party are convinced that if it comes to a duel between Merz and the incumbent, Scholz will prevail.

“Merz has no government experience at all,” said Nils Schmid, the SPD’s foreign affairs spokesman. “And he’s also got a very short fuse. I’m sure we can beat him.”

The big fear among Social Democrats had been that it wouldn’t be Merz running as the centre-right’s candidate for chancellor but Hendrik Wüst, prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia. But he announced earlier this week that he would not be running.

“Wüst would have been a lot more challenging for us,” said Johannes Fechner, a senior SPD MP. Wüst is seen as a centrist interested in social issues — “not like Merz, a pro-business technocrat who just wants to shrink the welfare state”.

Indeed, since taking the helm of the CDU in 2022, Merz has worked hard to move it in a more conservative, business-friendly direction, away from the fuzzy liberalism of Angela Merkel, who won a power struggle against him in the early 2000s and went on to rule Germany as chancellor from 2005-21.

But Merz’s critics think he has gone too far. “He runs the risk of losing some of the Merkel voters,” said Schmid.

Merz also polls badly among young people and women, many of whom see him as a 1990s man. “The next election will be about shaping the future with Olaf Scholz, or going back to the past with Friedrich Merz,” said Dirk Wiese, another senior SPD MP.

What to watch today

1. European parliament debates floods, organised crime, Hungarian visa scheme and mpox.

2. Inaugural session of Turkish-Swedish ministerial security talks in Ankara.

Now read these