This article is part of POLITICO’s MEP Survival Guide, an introduction to the Brussels bubble and the European Parliament.
Just because the European Parliament is kicking off a new term doesn’t mean it starts with a clean slate. Plenty of thorny, unresolved or new policy issues will find their way onto the plenary agenda — or might even land straight on your desk.
Here’s a brief on nine files you can expect to get familiar with fast over the next few months.
Holding internet platforms responsible
One of the looming challenges of the next five years is one of the biggest puzzles regarding the future of the internet: How do you regulate platforms like Facebook and Google to prevent wrongdoing but without killing the digital engine powering the modern economy?
Under current rules, internet companies are not liable for illegal content hosted on their platforms, including terrorist propaganda and hate speech. They are required to remove flagged illegal content but do not have to actively monitor what’s posted by users. Some platforms have started to actively monitor for things like ISIS videos. A few also scan for nudity, racist comments or other harmful content.
The law at the center of the debate, the EU’s e-Commerce Directive, was first adopted in 2000 and hasn’t been updated since. Tech giants argue that the liability exemption it contains, along with a similar measure in the U.S. Communications Decency Act, is a cornerstone of the internet economy that turned them into some of the world’s largest, richest companies.
But the mood is changing and now the tech industry is gearing up to become part of the conversation when the European Commission, Council and Parliament reassess the liability regime.
Regulating truckers
Good luck cleaning up the mess left by the last Parliament on the controversial reforms to the haulage market. In the last mandate, lawmakers agreed their position on new EU rules governing how truckers can roam the bloc, including specifications on driving times, how many drop-offs they should be allowed to do in a foreign country and when local labor rules should apply to an inherently mobile workforce.
It might sound like a relatively mundane clutch of EU regulations, but the issue has split the bloc along rich and poor lines. French President Emmanuel Macron has been a vocal supporter of tougher rules for the sector in order to protect the Western European workforce from an influx of cheaper labor. But Central Europeans fear his alliance with Germany and Austria will shut their workers out of Europe’s single market and that the European Commission has taken Paris’ side.
Here’s where the new Parliament comes in. After a fractious debate, rejected votes and much hand-wringing in the final months of the last mandate, a first reading was passed in plenary. But MEPs didn’t sign off on the mandate to start interinstitutional negotiations, meaning more votes will have to take place before talks on a final set of laws can start with the Council.
Reforming gas rules
The upcoming energy agenda will be all about gas. Now that EU policymakers have agreed to reform the bloc’s electricity markets to accommodate more renewables and better connect power grids, the Commission is due to come out with proposals aimed at reforming gas markets, including by promoting what the industry calls “green” gas, such as hydrogen and synthetic fuels. Parliament will soon be called upon to weigh in with amendments.
Showering the planet with (green) gold
The new crop of MEPs will be hearing a lot about “sustainable finance” — the EU bubble’s latest buzz word. The Commission wants to foster sustainable investment, while making sure that label is not used to “greenwash” investment in polluting businesses.
Figuring out what counts as a green investment will be crucial to harnessing the mix of government and private money needed to revamp the world’s energy, transport and farming sectors in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Whichever bloc sets the rules will also secure an immense advantage for its domestic financial industry, which is why Brussels is keen to set global standards.
An EU expert group has been assessing economic sectors to determine which activities classify as environmentally sustainable for investment purposes across the bloc. The next Commission will now consult on the suggested sustainable investment screening criteria, which will be the basis of any further legislation on sustainable finance.
Overhauling agriculture policy (at last)
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest single item on the EU budget, making its reform not just the mother of all files for Europe’s agriculture policy but one of the most highly politicized bits of the bloc’s policymaking.
The CAP reform aims at better targeting farm subsidies and making more of the money contingent on environmental protection. The bill is divided into three separate pieces of legislation.
EU institutions did not begin negotiating a deal before the European election despite a push from Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan. The Commission now needs to decide whether to move forward with Hogan’s plan or to withdraw the proposal and put forward a new vision for the CAP.
In Parliament, the agriculture committee managed to vote on a draft position, but ran out of time to bring the file to plenary for approval, which would have cemented it as the institutions’ position for negotiations with the Commission and Council. That leaves the newly seated agriculture committee free to restart the process.
Hammering out the EU budget
The new Parliament will have to negotiate with the Council of the EU on a myriad of regulations relating to the 2021-2027 EU budget. Parliament doesn’t have a formal right to negotiate over the big decisive questions of the budget, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a role to play. Once EU leaders reach unanimous agreement on the broad outlines of the next budget, Parliament has the power to vote it down, sending it back to the Council for another try.
The tussle over the budget is entangled with the CAP reform, since the budget negotiations will determine how much money is available for agricultural programs. The Commission has proposed a 5 percent overall drop in spending on agriculture, but experts have objected that a careful assessment of the Commission’s plan shows the real cuts would amount to closer to 15 percent.
Fighting hackers
Europe is waking up to the vulnerabilities and risks that come with a globally integrated and complex information technology sector. Leading cybersecurity companies and Western intelligence agencies have warned that hackers — often state-backed — have infiltrated Europe’s industrial, economic and infrastructure companies for years, as part of industrial espionage campaigns. It’s the kind of thing that keeps executives in Germany’s industrial heartland up at night.
Cybersecurity lawmakers in the next Commission are likely to zoom in further on the issue of “supply chain security.” The outgoing Commission turned hawkish on some of the core questions around the digital security of Europe’s industries. It has pushed capitals to set up stricter security reviews for 5G infrastructure, in light of concerns about Chinese telecom vendors like Huawei. Meanwhile, it is drafting briefing books for its successor on how to decrease the dependency of European technology on foreign supply chain companies.
New MEPs will be faced with politically hypersensitive questions around global trade, trust and security, as the Commission presents its plans to counter these threats.
Taking on the EU’s ‘systemic rival’
Forced technology transfers, reciprocity in public procurement, industrial subsidies: The next Commission will have to secure EU unity in the face of rising Chinese influence. The bloc designated Beijing as a “strategic rival;” now it’ll have to take action.
Backlash from Paris and Berlin from the Commission’s decision to block the Alstom-Siemens rail mega-merger means Brussels will have to follow up on a Franco-German push for a European industrial strategy. That includes mulling whether the bloc should allow for the creation of so-called European champions that can take on Asian rivals, even if it means rewriting its competition rulebook.
A top priority will also be to press China to engage more in World Trade Organization reforms, according to the director general of the Commission’s trade department, Jean-Luc Demarty. “If there is no reform to the WTO system, in particular on the rulebook and subsidies, the WTO system will be no longer relevant,” he warned.
Ensuring that countries like China open up domestic tenders to EU bidders — also known as reciprocity in public procurement — will also be high on the agenda. The EU can be expected to move quickly to block access to its markets to countries that keep their doors closed. This will be Brussels’ third try to get national governments to agree on a common position, but the Commission thinks this time the winds have turned in its favor. A new, revised proposal can be expected to land on MEPs’ desk.
Tackling drug pricing
While drugs can be approved at the EU level, negotiations about whether and how much to pay are up to each member country. The Commission has been pushing for more cooperation on assessing new drugs, but has run into a wall in the Council of the EU representing member countries.
Health technology assessment is the process of evaluating how much a drug is worth — a decision that brings science, politics and ethics into play, given scarce health system resources. The Commission is proposing cooperation on just the first stage of HTA, the scientific assessment of how a new drug performs compared with the existing treatment. That would avoid having to repeat the process in each country; many smaller countries also say they just don’t have the expertise or resources to do this themselves.
To ensure there’s no duplication of efforts, the Commission has proposed making use of the jointly produced scientific report mandatory in a country’s broader HTA deliberations, and the Parliament backed this approach by a wide margin.
The file is now stuck in the Council. A blocking minority of countries — led by Germany and France — say requiring countries to use the joint report infringes on a national prerogative and that a voluntary collaboration would be better. All eyes are on Berlin to break the impasse, and negotiations may continue until the German Council presidency in late 2020.