Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Margrethe Vestager will not return for a third term as the EU’s most powerful antitrust official, as the Danish government prepares to nominate a different candidate as their European commissioner.
Officials in Copenhagen told the Financial Times that the Danes would not be choosing Vestager, whose Social Liberal party did poorly in Denmark’s 2022 elections and is no longer part of the ruling coalition.
“Vestager is out. Nobody owes her anything,” said a former minister from one of the current coalition parties.
Vestager has overseen competition and antitrust policy in the bloc for 10 years, becoming renowned for hitting big US tech companies with multibillion-euro fines. Apple chief executive Tim Cook labelled one of her rulings “total political crap” and then-US president Donald Trump called her the EU’s “tax lady”.
But her star started fading towards the end of her second term amid mounting legal challenges to her rulings and France obstructing her attempt to lead the European Investment Bank.
Vestager rose to prominence in Denmark through tenacity in coalition talks following an election in 2011. She became minister for economic and internal affairs, a role that brought her to Brussels where she helped spearhead efforts to create the European banking union.
“She is astonishing in terms of stamina,” said one EU official who regularly worked with Vestager. “It’s absolutely crazy. She read all the stuff . . . round the clock and had hundreds of meetings and she is still alive.”
She is said to have inspired the character of Birgitte Nyborg Christensen — a liberal from a small party who rises to become prime minister — in the hit Netflix series Borgen.
While she quickly built a reputation as a fierce enforcer of the bloc’s antitrust rules, she also ruffled feathers with governments in Europe and across the Atlantic.
Vestager backed down last year on her choice of a US academic as her chief economist under pressure from Emmanuel Macron, president of France. The incident created bad blood between the two liberal politicians, with Paris withholding its support for the Dane during her push for the EIB presidency.
In 2019 she blocked the merger between the German and French rail companies Siemens and Alstom, despite anger in Berlin and Paris. She also blocked the merger of Hutchison and Telefónica’s UK arms in 2016 — a move critics said went against the goals of the bloc’s efforts to create a digital single market.
Her earlier decisions against Big Tech also strained relations between Brussels and Washington during the Barack Obama and Trump administrations. But under President Joe Biden, the US mirrored Vestager’s push to bring companies such as Google and Amazon in line.
“The US administration has in recent years started to focus its attention on digital companies, and begun to take much more robust enforcement action,” said Ken Daly, an antitrust lawyer at Sidley Austin. “I ask myself whether the US would have ever gotten there if Europe hadn’t gone first.”
Starting in 2017, Vestager took three antitrust decisions against Google, fining the US giant a total of €8.25bn for allegedly abusing its market dominance. The company has appealed against those rulings, with the bloc’s top court upholding the first fine in January, while the other litigation is ongoing.
Apple as well as other tech giants Facebook-parent Meta and Alphabet, which owns Google, have also been pursued under a landmark tech bill inspired by her market abuse cases — the Digital Markets Act.
Her groundbreaking use of state-aid rules to break down aggressive corporate tax schemes had more mixed results.
The European General Court in 2020 ruled against her order for Apple to pay €14.3bn to Ireland after the Silicon Valley company secured generous tax exemptions she deemed constituted illegal state aid. That order prompted Cook’s “political crap” comment. The commission has appealed against the ruling, with a final judgment expected in coming months.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will start interviewing commissioner candidates next week, with the new executive expected to take office later in the autumn. Losing Vestager will increase the gender disparity in the new commission despite von der Leyen’s pledges to close the gap.
The college of commissioners has one member for each of the bloc’s 27 countries. In the outgoing executive, 12 commissioners are female. Of the 15 commissioners formally nominated for the new commission, 13 are men.
The commission said it would not comment on nominations by member states. A spokesperson for Vestager also declined to comment.
Copenhagen is still making up its mind about its candidate, but three men — all from the ruling Social Democrat party — are seen as frontrunners: climate minister Dan Jørgensen, business minister Morten Bødskov, and finance minister Nicolai Wammen.
EU officials who work with Vestager say they are in the dark about what she does next. Nor is it clear who will take on the EU’s competition role.
The current Belgian commissioner Didier Reynders is a potential candidate, as well as Dutch commissioner Wopke Hoekstra and French commissioner Thierry Breton.
“In her first term Vestager was seen as tough enforcer,” said Georg Riekeles, associate director at the European Policy Centre. In her second term, she helped craft the powerful new rule book for tech giants, he added.
“Not many will fill her shoes,” said an EU official who worked closely with Vestager.
Read the full article here