Transport Brief - After EU elections, transport sector should be careful what it wishes for

A common complaint of the transport sector in Brussels is that it does not get the profile or political attention it deserves.

Just last week, exiting European Parliament Transport Committee Chair Karima Delli proudly told Euractiv that her “greatest achievement” was bumping transport up the political agenda.

Brussels transport folk are not wrong. Theirs is a crucial sector in people’s daily lives, but it somehow rarely seems to enter the realm of high politics, or front-page headlines.

But with the continued rise of the far right in this weekend’s European elections, and populism now a structural feature of European politics, a low political profile may be no bad thing.

In recent months, transport has already gotten a taste of the politicisation of previously technical issues, and the experiences have not been positive.

In Germany, the de facto 2035 ban on the internal combustion engine became a political hot potato in the election campaign, with conservatives promising to revoke the ban.

It is questionable whether these mixed signals are in the best interests of carmakers. True, China is not competing on this older technology, but there’s probably a pretty good reason why the country is instead betting on batteries and electric vehicles (EVs).

And EVs are exactly where we’ll next see politicisation at play in the transport sector – as early as tomorrow. In a crowd-pleasing move, the European Commission is expected to announce higher tariffs on imports of Chinese electric cars.

The move is meant to show how a strong Europe can protect its treasured car-making industry. But said industry is pretty ambivalent about whether tariffs are actually in their best interest.

The perspective of each company differs, but several European carmakers already sell and build a lot of cars in China, and are wary of new barriers to trade.

Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, a multinational car giant owning Fiat, Opel, and Peugeot/Citroen, has called tariffs “a major trap”. Meanwhile, German Transport Minister Volker Wissing pushed back against potential tariffs, in line with the position of his country’s powerful automobile sector.

And if you think that day-to-day transport policy is too technical or boring to be politicised, think again.

In this year’s parliamentary elections, the French far-right Rassemblement national managed to politicise EU power market rules – a topic that is normally the preserve of PhD-wielding policy nerds.

Transport projects in particular cost a lot of money, and take a long time to deliver visible benefits. They cross borders, and those who benefit rarely bear their environmental impact. Between the local, regional, national and European levels, the sector is rife with politicisation opportunities.

So if over the next five years, EU transport policy remains neglected, niche, and sometimes a bit boring, just remember … it could always be worse.

Set to bid farewell to the European Parliament after three successive terms, French Green MEP and chair of the Transport Committee Karima Delli told Euractiv that the biggest achievement of her time there is bringing transport high on the agenda.

As electric vehicle continue their rollout, Euractiv spoke with several French industry players looking at battery recycling to capture and re-use critical raw materials.

German Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP/Renew) warned that EU rules risked creating “CO2 tourism”, where liquified CO2 from Europe would be unnecessarily shipped to other parts of the world, to produce e-fuels which are then re-imported into the EU market.

It is often argued that EU policy debates are detached from the everyday lives of European citizens and that European Parliament elections are fought on national and local issues. But the 2024 election campaigns were different.

The global liberal order has long been written off. It was naïve, the argument now goes, to think that trade would bind together countries’ interests and encourage cooperation over conflict. But Europe’s current China contortions suggest that global trade can still keep the peace.

Having spent years focusing on hydrogen, policymakers should switch their attention to direct electrification, which could deliver 90% of industrial process heat by 2035, argues a new study by the think-tank Agora Industry, released on Wednesday (5 June).

The German government announced on Tuesday (4 June) that it has received approval in principle from Brussels to allocate subsidies worth €1.75 billion to coal major LEAG but with the payout of one-third of the sum contingent upon future power and CO2 prices.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

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