Press

Die drei Ökonomen Shahin Vallee, Sebastian de Quant und Sander Tordoir fordern in einem Aufsatz noch etwas anderes: Dass Europa auch wegen eines unter Trump drohenden US-chinesischen Handelskriegs noch schneller wirtschaftlich unabhängiger von China werden müsse.

Sander Tordoir, a senior economist at the Centre for European Reform, similarly praised the package’s general sentiment but criticised it for proposing “too much of the same soft coordination that has failed us so far”.“I think directionally, it makes sense what they’re doing,” Tordoir told Euractiv. “They’re focussed on the right fault lines in the toolkit, like export controls and FDI screening, where Europe has been most vulnerable, fragmented.”

“Germans are so risk-averse, it’s almost a psychological thing,” said Sander Tordoir, an economist at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in Berlin.

“No amount of de-risking can make up for a sudden policy change that makes it harder for Europeans to sell into America,” says Ian Bond, deputy director at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “In a second term, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he could decide some other material is a risk to American security.”

As Charles Grant from the Centre for European Reform points out, von der Leyen faces far tougher, existential challenges than the French Socialist did. The current Commission president “has a much tougher set of problems to deal with,” he told Playbook. “Delors had to cope with Bosnia and the ERM [Exchange Rate Mechanism] crisis, while VDL has had to deal with even bigger headaches like COVID, Ukraine, illegal immigration and the rise of the far right/Orbán.