Thriving or surviving
Von der Leyen has sought to take ownership of the bloc’s policy to vet corporate deals — in response to demands from France and Germany to bend the EU’s antitrust rulebook to allow for the creation of “European champions.”
In particular, she has championed an overhaul of the EU’s merger guidelines that would give increased weight to considerations such as innovation, saying these would help companies “to thrive, scale, and innovate.”
But von der Leyen’s assertiveness has put her at odds with Ribera, her Spanish number two, who has defended the traditional role of EU’s trustbusters in fighting corporate abuse of dominance that inflicts harm on consumers.
“A blank check for companies to merge under whatever circumstances will not make Europe more competitive,” Ribera told a conference at the OECD in Paris last week. “Scale, in itself, is not a goal.”
Backers of the space deal say, for their part, that Project Bromo is a matter of survival for the European space industry against competitors from outside the bloc that have leads in technology, scale and access to funding.
None of the three companies can go it alone, Airbus defense and space chief Michael Schoellhorn, warned in an interview with POLITICO in January. European manufacturers have struggled against larger U.S. competitors as the market shifts from expensive, bespoke satellites toward mass-produced constellations and integrated space services.
Bromo is meant to pool engineering, production and research across Europe’s biggest players, creating the kind of cross-border industrial champion already represented in cross-border European missile maker MBDA. But it wouldn’t compete broadly against SpaceX and would have a joint corporate structure rather than being fully vertically integrated.
Chris Lunday contributed reporting.