“I want him to go there with the strongest possible mandate from this house,” Hilde Vautmans, the report’s author, said in a debate on Tuesday evening. “Europe has economic power. It’s time to use it.”
The remarks echo those made by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron in a joint letter earlier this week, advocating that the European Commission be handed more powers to restrict or even cut off imports from countries that create “severe and systematic distortions” in the EU.
While some MEPs hailed the French-German joint approach as proof of a unified position, Polish MEP Mariusz Kamiński from the European Conservatives and Reformists said creating “pragmatic economic ties is not only cynical, but irresponsible or outright stupid.”
China is a “communist dictatorship that poses a threat to the free world,” he continued.
He’s not alone in that sentiment, as for many lawmakers, simply tackling Chinese overcapacity isn’t enough. The Commission needs to address China’s growing human rights abuses, escalations in the Taiwan Strait, and its role in the war in Ukraine, they said.
“We have to recognize that China is behaving in a way that is endangering our interests. Not just on trade but on security and defense,” said Spanish MEP Nicolás Pascual de la Parte from the center-right European People’s Party. “The human rights situation has not improved, but it has disappeared from our agenda in recent years.”