“My name is Teresa Ribera.” There were only a few minutes left before noon when the vice-president, still Spanish, introduced herself in Strasbourg to what will be one of her colleagues in the European Commission. Ursula von der Leyen had just announced the composition of her new cabinet in which the figure of Ribera appears as one of the most relevant. In addition to being the socialist with the most important position in Brussels due to the electoral weight that the PSOE represents for her European family, she will assume the greatest level of power that Spain has had since entering the community club with the vice-presidency for Green Transition and Fairness and Competition.
Ribera has arrived brand new at the seat of the European Parliament, where he will have to submit to the scrutiny of the MEPs of the committees that correspond to his responsibilities. Although Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP has announced that it will vote against him, the groups that support the majority believe that there will be no problem in proceeding with Von der Leyen’s appointments. “The socialists know that what happens to Raffaele Fito will happen to Ribera and Stéphane Séjourné,” says a well-versed in parliamentary ins and outs regarding the threat by the socialists and liberals to reject the vice-president of the Italian far right. The overlapping interests therefore make it difficult for one to punish the other.
So, passing the parliamentary exam is the first challenge that Ribera has on the horizon (it will be in late October or early November), but it is relatively easy for him. He takes it for granted and has even designated his closest team, among which is Miguel Gil Tertre, until now chief economist of the Department of Energy, as his right-hand man in Brussels. From there, Ribera will have to take on some of the most sensitive and significant European policies at a time when Europe is struggling to stand out amid fierce competition from the United States and China, while maintaining its ecological ambition. been threatened in recent months.
Promoting “super businesses”
“Europe needs a new approach to competition policy: one that better supports companies expanding in global markets, that allows European businesses and consumers to reap the full benefits of effective competition, and that is better focused on our shared goals, including decarbonisation and a fair transition. Our goal must be to ensure a level playing field, to ensure that companies have incentives to invest, innovate and grow,” Von der Leyen says in the letter handing her over to the EU.
Ribera will have to “develop a new framework for state aid to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, deploy industrial decarbonization and guarantee sufficient production capacity for clean technologies.” In other words, it must rethink the model of the 27 to face the subsidy war between the United States and China without producing, as has happened in recent years, a fragmentation of the single market because Germany, which has an incomparable fiscal power, injects millions into its industry to compete with other powers, but to the detriment of the rest of its European partners.
Changing the subsidy war without Germany always winning
“You have to preserve a level playing field while pursuing further simplification of state aid, prioritising the aid that distorts the market the most,” Von der Leyen told her. In modernising state aid, Ribera will have to deliver on the promise to relax the legal framework to include housing policy, which was one of the president’s major promises during the debate on her re-election at the request of the Socialists.
One of the major problems of European competitiveness, according to reports commissioned by the EU itself, is the small size of its companies. Ribera will have to redo the rules of competition to allow European “giants” to put them in a position to compete with the Americans and the Chinese. “The competitive model has become obsolete,” admit sources close to the vice-president, who advocate the need to think not only “about national champions but also about systems that allow the entire value chain to have the capacity to interact.”
Ribera will share the momentum of the Clean Industrial Pact – engaged for the first hundred days of his mandate – with the vice-president for prosperity and industrial strategy, the French liberal Stéphane Séjourné. This anticipates a clash that has already occurred this year between the portfolios of Competition and Industry. In Ribera’s entourage, they are trying to minimize these potential conflicts by assuming that the profiles chosen by Von der Leyen are used to negotiation and teamwork. In fact, the German put pressure on Emmanuel Macron to remove from the equation the Commissioner for the Single Market, Thierry Breton, who this mandate has clashed lastingly with the vice-president for competition, Margrethe Vestager.
Defending the green agenda
To a large extent, the distribution of power will depend on the general directorates that depend on each, but the Spanish executive is convinced that it has conducted a good negotiation. “We will have a very powerful general directorate, capable of conditioning all European industrial policy and supervising the entire ecological transition. There was no choice between industry and green. We find ourselves with a hand in both,” say the sources consulted.
Ribera’s intention is to introduce “environmental sensitivities” into all EU competition policy. He will also inherit the major antitrust cases that in recent years have had “big tech” as the main protagonists. Vestager has just won two very relevant victories by suing Apple for non-payment of taxes in Ireland and Google for abuse of power. But there is also a bittersweet part. Joaquín Almunia has become persona non grata in the Spanish naval sector for declaring tax subsidies illegal.
Ribera will also have to fight to keep the green agenda alive at a time when the EU has put the brakes on environmental policies due to complaints from industry and the political interests behind them. But she will not be alone in this either, as Von der Leyen has appointed conservative Wopke Hoekstra in charge of climate, neutrality and clean growth and Sweden’s Jessika Roswall, also from the EPP, in charge of environment, water and a competitive circular economy.
“It will guide the work of implementing the current legal framework to help us achieve our 2030 goals in the simplest and fairest way and in dialogue with all interested parties,” Von der Leyen asks Ribera: “Once the goal of reducing emissions by 90% by 2040 is enshrined in the European Climate Law, we will need to work closely with all stakeholders to prepare a new legal framework that will allow us to reach net zero emissions by mid-century.
All these challenges will have to be overcome thanks to Von der Leyen’s promise to simplify European rules to alleviate as much as possible the so-called “legislative fatigue” complained of by the industry.
