On September 17, 2024, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the structure of the new Commission and her nominees to serve as Commissioners for the upcoming 5-year term (2024-2029). Each of these nominees will be scrutinized and need to be confirmed by the EU Parliament in the coming weeks.

Teresa Ribera Rodriguez was designated to succeed to Margrethe Vestager, current Commission Executive Vice President, and Commissioner for Competition. In addition, she would take up the role of Executive Vice President (“EVP”) for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

Background. Teresa Ribera Rodriguez is a Spanish jurist, university professor of Public Law, and politician. She holds degrees in law as well as constitutional law and political science, including from the Complutense University of Madrid. As a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Ribera has served as Deputy Prime Minister since 2020 and Minister for the Ecological Transition of Spain since 2018. Ribera played an important role in the negotiation of the Paris Climate Agreement, was the EU’s chief negotiator at the COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai and has advised the World Economic Forum and the United Nations on sustainability and climate change.

Mission. Ribera’s portfolio – EVP for a “Clean, Just and Competitive Transition” – echoes the recent Draghi report[1] on European competitiveness, submitted to President von der Leyen on September 9, 2024, calling for a circular and low-carbon economy. Her broad aim, with other Commissioners, will be to “unlock investment, create lead markets for clean tech and put in place conditions for companies to grow and compete.”[2]

As EVP, the Commissioners for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth (Wopke Hoekstra), Environment Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy (Jessika Roswall), Energy and Housing (Dan Jorgensen), and Health and Animal Welfare (Oliver Varhelyi), will report to Ribera.

Competition Role. As Ribera’s Mission Letter from President von der Leyen lays out, her mission will include the Competition portfolio and the task to “modernize the EU’s competition policy to ensure it supports European companies to innovate, compete and lead world-wide and contributes to [the EU’s] wider objectives on competitiveness and sustainability, social fairness and security.”[3]

The Mission Letter sets out specific 11 priorities in relation to competition policy:

  1. Developing a new State aid framework as part of the Clean Industrial Deal to accelerate the roll-out of renewable energy, to deploy industrial decarbonisation, and to ensure sufficient manufacturing capacity of clean tech.
  2. Reviewing the Horizontal Merger Control Guidelines, giving weight to the EU economy’s “more acute needs in respect of resilience, efficiency and innovation, the time horizons and investment intensity of competition in certain strategic sectors, and the changed defence and security environment.”
  3. Preserving the level playing field while further simplifying State Aid policies.
  4. Focusing on the challenges facing SMEs and small midcaps, notably to address risks of ‘killer acquisitions’ reducing possible sources of future competition.
  5. Supporting the implementation of the future European Competitiveness Fund to ensure consistency with State Aid policy and working with Member States for swift proposals for so-called Important Projects of Common Interest (“IPCEls”, i.e., energy infrastructure projects connecting EU countries with each other and with countries outside the EU) for the most strategic sectors and technologies.
  6. Leading the work, in close cooperation with Member States, to make State Aid review of IPCEIs simpler and faster, and to examine the proposal in the Draghi Report to expand IPCEls for innovation in strategic sectors.
  7. Strengthening and speeding up enforcement of competition rules, in close cooperation with national competition authorities. This will include focusing action on the most distortive aids and practices and working to accelerate authorisation of compatible aids and transactions in strategic fields, and to ensure timely clarity for economic operators that cooperate in such sectors, for example, when pooling data for artificial intelligence experimentation.
  8. Working with other Members of the College to “vigorously” enforce the Foreign Subsidies Regulation (“FSR”), including by proactively mapping the most problematic practices that could lead to competition distortions.
  9. Actively contributing to stronger global cooperation among competition authorities and, more broadly, working closely with other Commissioners. The mission letter indicates that exchanging information and market knowledge in a sector can help ensure that new legislation contributes to fair and open competition and that competition policy is evidence-based and takes into account sectoral policies, e.g., in the food and farming sector.
  10. Addressing the challenges and dynamics of digital markets, including platform economies and data-driven business models, and ensuring “rapid and effective enforcement actions” under the Digital Markets Act.
  11. Proposing to revise State aid rules to enable housing support measures, notably for energy efficiency and social housing.

Industrial Policy, Tech Sovereignty, and Trade. President von der Leyen has also appointed several others EVPs and/or Commissioners whose portfolio will at least partly overlap with Ribera, requesting them to work together to boost Europe’s competitiveness and help the EU transition towards a circular and low-carbon economy. In particular:

  • Stéphane Séjourné – EVP for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy and Commissioner for the Industry, SMEs, and Single Market Portfolio. Séjourné, outgoing French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs and Member of the EU Parliament from 2019 to 2024, will help guide the work to put in place the conditions for Europe’s “new industrial strategy.”[4] To that end, Séjourné is tasked, among others, with (i) developing the Clean Industrial Deal in the first 100 days of the mandate, (ii) presenting an Industrial Decarbonisation Accelerator Act to support European lead markets for the development, production and diffusion of clean tech in industry, (iii) developing the future European Competitive Fund to ensure that the EU invest in the innovation and technologies that will shape the EU economy, (iv) leading the work on the set up of new IPCEIs for the most strategic sectors and technologies, (v) revising the Public Procurement Directives to help ensure security of supply for certain vital technologies while reducing the administrative burden, and (vi) developing a horizontal Single Market Strategy that promotes cross-border provision of services and goods within the EU. Séjourné will also work to enforce the FSR.
  • Henna Virkkunen – EVP for Tech Sovereignty, Security, Democracy and Commissioner for the Digital and Frontier Technologies portfolio. Virkkunen is a nominee from Finland who has served two terms as a Member for the EU Parliament. Virkkunen’s mission will be to “lead Europe’s efforts in shaping a competitive, resilient and inclusive digital future.”[5] She will be in charge, among others, of (i) leading work on boosting AI innovation, making it safer and more trustworthy, (ii) intensifying the EU’s efforts and investments concerning the next wave of frontier technologies, in particular supercomputing, semiconductors, the IoT, quantum computing, space tech and beyond, (iii) developing an EU Cloud and AI Development Act to increase computational capacity as well as creating a single EU-wide cloud policy for public administrations, and (iv) developing a long-term EU quantum Chips plan. Virkkunen will also ensure that the Commission takes “rapid and effective enforcement actions” under both the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.
  • Maroš Šefčovič – Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security; Interinstitutional Relations and Transparency. Šefčovič is a nominee from Slovakia who enters his fourth term as a Commissioner. Šefčovič will be in charge, among others, of the implementation of EU’s Sanctions and trade defense instruments, as well as the adoption of the revised Foreign Direct Investment Regulation. Šefčovič will also oversee the customs policy and will play a role in enhancing investments and cooperation with the United States, lead on deepening EU’s partnership with the UK, and ensure balanced economic relations with China.[6]

Next Steps. The confirmation hearings for the new Commissioners-designates should begin in October or November and will be followed by a vote (by simple majority) in the plenary session of the EU Parliament. Assuming all nominees are confirmed, the new College of Commissioners should take office on November 1, 2024 (or December 1, 2024, if some of the hearings are delayed to November).[7]

Implications. Several preliminary observations can be drawn from those appointments for the competition policy:

  1. By again making the Commissioner for Competition an EVP and appointing a strong politician and jurist to the role, President Von der Leyen has again placed competition policy at the heart of the new Commission’s mandate.
  2. At the same time, Ribera’s portfolio is significantly wider than competition matter. Her demanding portfolio beyond competition (including overseeing the green transition), coupled with her prior experience in sustainability and climate change, may draw her attention and focus away from competition matters.
  3. The Mission Letter entrusts Ribera with the objective of enforcing competition while taking greater account of industrial policy goals, which will raise a number of issues in practice – for instance, how innovation, sustainability, or perhaps “green effects”, can be more closely woven into merger reviews, or whether the objectives of “resilience” and sustainability can take precedence over competition analysis.
  4. The portfolios of several Commissioners – in particular, the EVP for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy (Stéphane Séjourné) and EVP for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy (Henna Virkkunen) – overlap at least to some extent in the areas of competition, industrial policy, environment, IT/digital economy, and foreign subsidies. While this may trigger more exchanges and sharing of market knowledge among Directorates, it may also result in conflicts which President von Der Leyen will ultimately need to arbitrate.
  5. Substantively, the mission letter gives great weight to State aid and the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, and (at least optically) less so to other competition enforcement areas, such as merger control, anticompetitive agreements, and abuse of dominance. Digital markets are mentioned only once, in sharp contrast with Margrethe Vestager’s 2019 Mission Letter, which was heavily focused on “making Europe fit for a Digital Age.”
  6. On merger control, the mission letter expressly requests Ribera to evaluate and address the risks of “killer acquisitions,” which suggests that, in the wake of the recent Illumina-Grail[8] Judgment, the new Commissioner will continue to focus on addressing the perceived “enforcement gap” resulting from below-threshold mergers.

[1] Mario Draghi report, “The future of European competitiveness”, available here. 

[2] Mission Letter from President von der Leyen to Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, p.5, available here.

[3] Mission Letter from President von der Leyen to Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, p.6, available here.

[4] Mission Letter from President von der Leyen to Stéphane Séjourné, p.5-7, available here.

[5] Mission Letter from President von der Leyen to Henna Virkkunen, p.6-8, available here.

[6] Mission Letter from President von der Leyen to Maroš Šefčovič, p.5-6, available here.

[7] After the publication of this blog post, the confirmation hearings were set for November 4-12, 2024. Assuming all nominees are confirmed, the new College of Commissioners should take office on December 1, 2024.

[8] Judgment of September 3, 2024, Illumina and GRAIL and Commission, Cases C-622/11 and C-625/22 ; Cleary Gottlieb Alert Memo, “Illumina/GRAIL: ECJ Rules European Commission Lacks Jurisdiction to Review Merger Falling Below EU and National Merger Thresholds”, September 5, 2024, available here.