The lobby of the energy-intensive industry is demanding: Give us more money and lower the requirements, or we will be gone and leave you unemployed. Ursula von der Leyen shouldn’t make things that easy for her.
As soon as she officially declared that she wanted to continue, the demands on Ursula von der Leyen became louder. The President of the European Commission is facing a second term in office, which is due to begin in the autumn. The contrast to when she took office in December 2019 could hardly be sharper. There is not much left of the spirit of optimism with which your Commission invented the “Green Deal” and charted Europe’s path to climate neutrality. Today, in the post-pandemic times of war, Europe’s economy is stagnating. There is concern that the EU could lose out in global competition.