Departments, industry, trade union: Merkel forges a broad alliance against Euro 7

With a new emissions standard, the EU wants to drastically limit the emissions of pollutants from cars from 2025. Critics see this as the end of the internal combustion engine. Reason enough for the Chancellery to make the protest a top priority and to open a broad front.

Chancellor Angela Merkel criticizes the EU Commission's plans for the stricter Euro 7 emissions standard. To say that the combustion engine will be made technically impossible, "that would not be a good thing," she said in a video chat on the occasion of the election of Rainer Dulger as the new president of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations (BDA). To this end, she wants to set up "a permanent communication channel" with Brussels.

Merkel had agreed with Finance Minister Olaf Scholz that the Chancellery and Finance Department would "take this into their own hands" with the participation of the Economics, Transport and Environment departments. In order to advance the lobbying work against the legislative measures in Brussels, a new working group was founded with the Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), the trade unions, the federal government and the National Platform for Mobility. According to Merkel, the exchange should be "very close", "so that we can say from the outset what is feasible in terms of climate protection, but what is perhaps also a structural policy measure that we have to take literally."

The Commission's plans provide that new cars with the stricter Euro emissions standard 7 from 2025 will only be allowed to emit 10 milligrams of nitrogen per kilometer in the future. VDA boss Hildegard Müller had stated that the planned specifications were "technically impossible in practice" and would in fact mean the end of diesel and gasoline engines. At the same time, the CO2 fleet limits are to be revised early in the second quarter of 2021, with the aim of promoting electric mobility.

The CDU / CSU group in the European Parliament has already protested and warned against the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the EU in a letter to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Merkel referred to the additional funding for electromobility that the federal government had already decided. "But we will still be dependent on the internal combustion engine in the next few years, and in this light we have this standing commission that will also start working soon."