The Commission is proposing a sophisticated EU-wide model to curb electricity prices. However, governments are suspicious of its implementation.
As if it had not been clear to all observers for weeks how dissatisfied most member state governments are with the European Commission’s slow response to the energy price crisis, Charles Michel, President of the European Council, let it rustle in the newspaper forest again at the weekend. “We need to address the issue of price caps,” he told several international newspapers in a group interview. “We are not starting this debate today. That is why we have invited the Commission several times in the past to put concrete proposals on the table. An ideological debate about instruments is not enough.”
In fact, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the Commission with whom Michel has the closest mutual resentment, has been in no particular hurry since the European Council formally invited her for the first time in October 2021. For a week, however, the Commission has been spurting on.