EU Parliament waters down supply chain act
The European Parliament has voted in favour of easing the EU Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, or supply chain act, with a majority consisting mainly of conservatives and far-right groups, after a compromise between the European People's Party (EPP) and the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens collapsed. Green and Social Democrat politicians accuse the EPP of "breaking the firewall". Commentators examine the vote and its consequences.
Fatal alliance at the expense of the climate
The Green Deal is turning black, Il Manifesto rails:
“While the world gathers in Belém for COP30, the gap between political decisions and the climate targets set out in the 2019 Green Deal is widening in Europe. Yesterday, in an important vote, the European Parliament ratified for the first time the new alternative to the so-called 'Ursula majority'. ... The EPP, the largest political group, has turned its back on the Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens and allied itself with the far right of the ECR (Meloni) and the PfE (Lega and Le Pen) to water down the commitments of European industry to comply with social and environmental standards and to compensate for pollution.”
Toxic populism
L'Echo is disappointed not only by the conservatives in the European Parliament:
“In demolishing the control tower, the EPP and its allies on the far right are destroying the radar that the driving forces of our societies were following with shared enthusiasm. But this vote also represents a failure on the part of the other established parties, which are in a state of chaos, incapable of aligning their egos with a vision for the future: aren't democracy and social and environmental standards supposed to be their preserve? Populism is a poison spreading through the ranks of our institutions, and could make short work of other pillars of the European project. Unless there is a salutary wake-up call.”
Victory against ideological stubbornness
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says the Social Democrats and Greens could have prevented the EPP from allying with groups further to the right in the vote:
“It's been four weeks since the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee approved a compromise between the four political groups [EPP, Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens]. The plenary session of Parliament then overturned this compromise, much to the delight of some of the Social Democrats and Greens. The fact that the EPP was able to push through its own proposals in a less diluted version has little to do with an alleged collapse of the firewall and a lot to do with the ideological stubbornness of certain sections of these two groups who simply don't care about easing the burden on businesses.”
Also harmful in economic terms
The taz doubts that weakening the law will boost the economy in the long-term:
“As global competition grows ever more aggressive, German and European companies need more attractive products that appeal to buyers. Electric cars, for example, will become more attractive if the new technology doesn't constantly have to defend itself against accusations that its raw materials come from slave and child labour in polluting mines in poor countries. ... Moderate human rights regulation is not an economic killer, as the EPP claims. Economic policy à la Manfred Weber, which seeks to rewrite rules that hundreds of thousands of companies are just getting used to, is more harmful.”