People like to hold up Macron as being a good politician on the EU level, but from this it seems he has to go and is in the same league as the more obvious harmful Merz.

These directives are mostly useless bureaucracy. I don't think anything of value has been lost.

My experience with European Union is that the EU politicians mostly live in a ivory tower and spend their days producing garbage laws and aren't actually addressing anything important.

> Leaked documents 1 obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against.

I'm seeing the exact same narrative more and more right here on HN, in every thread in any way related to the EU - the idea that the likes of GDPR are destroying "competitiveness". That if only all of it would be axed, "competitiveness" would arise once more.

It's not a coincidence, especially with so much FAANG employees, either ex- or current, who spend even more on lobbying than the likes of Exxon highlighted in this article. Though it seems naive to blindly hope that even in the age of mass astroturfing, this place is somehow immune.

It's frightening just how similar the playbook and the players involved are, big oil and big tech being oh so alike.

[delayed]

Well, all lobbying basically circumvents sovereign democracy, there's nothing out of the ordinary I found out in this article other than business as usual.

Hopefully this will bring back some sort of competitiveness for the EU industry, and hence for EU society as a whole, but I have very big doubts about it. Back to becoming a real-life gigantic tourist park that is, then.

The EU green laws will have to be rewritten anyway. They are not of this world.

In the next tab, I am reading (in Czech) an article titled "Shall we produce tanks out of wood?" which addresses the fact that pushing all steel production out of Europe through unrealistic pollution demands and other regulations cannot be squared with maintaining any ability to defend ourselves.

(Link for the interested people: https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/ekonomika-byznys-rozhovor...)

This is, unfortunately, what Europeans collectivelly voted for.

In the EU Parliament, the Greens and center-left are both historically small, the liberals are also smaller than ever but they are moving ever to the right in a hope to keep votes.

Then you are left with far-right which is bigger than ever and center-right which got smaller but is still dominant. Both of these don't really care much for human rights and climate law.

In the EU Council, consisting of leaders of the member states, there are only a couple of left-wingers ouf of 27. The rest is (center-)right. Zero greens.