The meeting of ministers responsible for competitiveness in Bilbao on Tuesday 25 July provided an opportunity to prepare for the leaders’ summit in Granada in October. The Member States commented on their vision of an Open Strategic Autonomy, but did not go into detail. “Thanks to the progress we are making today, we will be taking a much more concrete approach to the new framework that we want to articulate and structure during the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council”, said the Spanish Minister for Industry and Tourism, Héctor Gómez Hernández.
Ahead of the meeting, however, the Spanish Presidency provided the EU27 with a study entitled ‘Resilient EU’ which outlines areas to work on, such as health, food safety and digital technology. This document is expected to be made public in the coming weeks.
On this basis, and in the context of the European Commission’s recent proposals to strengthen competitiveness, some delegations in Bilbao supported the importance of the supply of raw materials, for example. The Spanish Secretary of State for European Affairs, Pascual Navarro, also pointed out that other ministers had insisted on the openness of the EU and its trade policy in the debate on open strategic autonomy (see other news).
Funding for industry
The ministers also addressed the issue of funding to support industrial projects in the EU. The mid-term review of the multiannual financial framework and the proposal for a Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) (see EUROPE 13205/3) are part of these discussions.
For the German Secretary of State, Sven Giegold, there needs to be an “intelligent” combination of European funds and state aid at national level to help the industry with its transformation. The two are “not contradictory” and a compromise is possible, he told EUROPE.
Many Member States are reluctant to accept the idea of a budget increase to support competitiveness (see EUROPE 13227/21). The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, who replaced the Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, in Bilbao, insisted on the need to increase the budget: “If we want to develop a real policy of competitiveness and strategic autonomy, I think we also need to move towards additional resources. I hope that we will be able to convince people that there are indeed budgetary efforts to be made to achieve these objectives”, he told EUROPE ahead of the meeting. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)