by OLIVIER HOEDEMAN
Commission President von der Leyen has embarked on a radical deregulation campaign, with the clear intention to dismantle rules that business lobbies dislike, including social and environmental standards. The EU has seen deregulation waves before, but it’s very different this time: it’s not only far more comprehensive and ruthless, there’s unprecedented levels of support for it among governments and in the European Parliament. As a consequence, we risk a disastrous half-decade of deregulation, while climate change, the environment, equality, and social rights are put on the backburner – all in the name of ‘competitiveness’.
This article was first published on the website of transform! europe
A Wednesday at the end of February was the moment when it became clear beyond doubt that it’s different this time. On this day the European Commission presented a so-called Omnibus package to overhaul three major corporate sustainability laws. These three laws had been approved by the European Parliament and governments just a year or two earlier. But now the Commission was insisting on radically rolling back the ambitions of the legislation. The civil society coalition ECCJ described the Commission’s proposal as “full-scale deregulation designed to dismantle corporate accountability and abandon the EU’s Green Deal commitments”. In particular, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) would be radically scaled back, in the words of the ECCJ “giving reckless corporations a free pass to operate without consequences”. While the European Parliament and Council still need to discuss the Omnibus package and could save EU corporate sustainability laws from full-scale deregulation, the odds for this to happen don’t look good.
When presenting the Omnibus package during a press conference, Commission Vice-President Dombrovskis argued that this was a response to the “bigger picture” of the changed EU-US relationship, and referred to the Trump administration voting against a UN resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine as “a call to action”. Others have described the Omnibus package as Trump-inspired, but the reality is that this is just the first very visible chapter of an entirely homegrown EU deregulation agenda that has been under preparation for several years. And there’s a whole lot more to come.
The deregulation agenda is a central part of the Commission’s plans for the next five years, during which ‘competitiveness’ will be the uncontested yardstick for the EU. This new direction was already clear when Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented the political guidelines for her second term in July 2024. More details emerged in von der Leyen’s priorities for each of the candidate-commissioners a few months later. These ‘Mission Letters’ included over 15 different tools for systemic deregulation and slashing standards; most new, others harsher versions of existing ones. In the Commission’s main economic policy document for the next five years – the Competitiveness Compass, presented in January 2025 – corporate competitiveness was confirmed as the Commission’s overarching goal, with deregulation positioned as the key method to achieve it. More details of the deregulation agenda were revealed in the 14-page document ‘A simpler and faster Europe’ a month later.
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