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The year 2026 is set to put the EU’s powerful competition enforcers to the test in their ability to police big-ticket mergers. Brussels’ antitrust officials now risk seeing their wings clipped by a political shift favouring more so-called “European champions” deemed necessary to compete on a global level with the US and China.
This spring, Brussels will present a rewrite of its merger guidelines, a politically loaded reform that has to square legal robustness, economic realism and geopolitical urgency.
A wide range of industries, including major telecoms groups, have been pushing Brussels to allow for more flexibility in order to spur their acquisition plans in the bloc. They point to the Brussels call to action that is the report of Mario Draghi on European competitiveness, which argued that the EU’s competition enforcement has been too focused on consumer prices and called for an overhaul of competition rules.
“In an era of intense market and geopolitical rivalry, fragmentation is not a strength but a strategic liability,” said Alessandro Gropelli of telecom industry body Connect Europe, adding that this challenge is shared with many European industries. But the EU’s competition chief Teresa Ribera is increasingly making clear that she will not let competitiveness be the pretext for allowing market concentration that has long been unthinkable.
“We are not going to say: no worries, you can do whatever, we don’t care. If there is someone expecting that, they will be disappointed,” Ribera told the Financial Times in an interview last month. She stressed that the Draghi report did not call for blessing any operation of concentration that would only create “monopolies or oligopolies in a national jurisdiction”.
What Ribera does accept is the need for clearer guidance for business. She argues the revised framework should provide more “upfront clarity” towards companies about what they can expect from the antitrust enforcers and ensure innovation and efficiencies are taken more into account when the bloc’s officials assess mergers. For the former Spanish deputy prime minister, the route to scale and economic revival doesn’t come from relaxing guardrails but by completing the EU’s single market by taking down national barriers and fragmented regulation.
This is where the tightrope begins. Ribera will have to find a delicate balance to ensure a rules-based market that disciplines incumbents and empowers entrants, while also allowing companies to scale up to compete with Washington and Beijing — a key priority for her boss, commission president Ursula von der Leyen and for European leaders such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Despite that political pressure, a rewrite of the merger guidelines can only do so much, competition officials and lawyers argue. While they provide a useful tool for boardrooms to understand whether their plans are likely to get the nod from Brussels, the ultimate test will be in the cases that land on Ribera’s desk and whether her decisions match the politics swirling around them.
In her first year in office, the geopolitical uncertainty and the lack of direction from Brussels led to relatively few cases for competition officials to approve or block. Officials and lawyers working on mergers expect an uptick of cases this year. The approaches to them should give a clearer idea of where Ribera’s competition policy is heading.
That crunch period coincides with a critical change of leadership at the head of the bloc’s competition directorate. Since the departure of the unit’s top civil servant Olivier Guersent in August, the position has been filled on an interim basis.
Ribera has said she wanted to make a decision on who will steer the bloc’s day-to-day antitrust regime “very soon”. Her preferred option would be a woman that is “sound, respected, that can bring pressure and that can also allow the team to feel the pride and the reliability and the confidence to stay happy and proud of what they do”.
The choice is arguably Ribera’s most powerful lever as commissioner. As such, it has become a proxy battle inside the commission about the direction of travel. Ribera wants to ensure the new competition tsar doesn’t allow more industrial policy by the back door. A prolonged vacuum or an appointee closer to von der Leyen would weaken Ribera’s influence over competition priorities as she seeks to win the argument that size does not equal strength in the battle for Europe’s competitiveness.
