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What to watch when von der Leyen addresses the European Parliament

/ European Union / By

By Pieter Cleppe

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s planned presence in the visitors’ gallery is an unusual sight for a European Commission President’s State of the Union address. It is tied to an expected announcement of an “all encompassing” EU–Canada partnership covering trade and security, after the latest tit-for-tat tariff war between Ottawa and Washington. That diplomatic set-piece, more than the familiar climate talking points, is a useful place to start reading what Ursula von der Leyen will deliver in Strasbourg on 16 September.

The speech is already being prepared inside the Commission. Officials speaking off the record have told reporters that climate and artificial intelligence will feature heavily — Politico has previewed both files — but the political weather around the podium is set as much by migration, money and extra-European guests as by any single Green Deal target.

Geopolitics, China and industrial self-harm

China will almost certainly appear. The EU policy debate on the trade deficit with Beijing has intensified over recent months. In May the EU’s 12-month rolling deficit reached 376 billion euro, according to Eurostat — 8% higher than a year earlier. In 2025, for the first time, every single EU member state had a trade deficit with Beijing.

One diplomat from a major member state has commented that China’s export success “amounts to the destruction of our industrial base.” That reading is incomplete. As Daniel Kral of Oxford Economics has pointed out: “The EU’s key problem is not China dumping goods in the EU – as the EU’s share in China’s exports is flat. It is, first of all, a loss of EU exporters’ market share in third markets, and secondly a staggering collapse in the EU’s share of China’s imports – from 12% in 2019 to 8% now. No EU levers address these two things.”

A large share of the blame sits with the EU’s own energy policy, above all the Emission Trading System (ETS), a de facto climate tax that makes energy expensive and European industry uncompetitive. Even a protectionist should concede that extra barriers to Chinese goods make little sense while that self-harm continues.

Moreover, separate from energy policy, EU overregulation happens to boost China’s importance for the EU unintentionally. Take for example vaping products. Around 90 percent of regular vapes come from China, but also a large part of the irregular market is supplied by Chinese-made products that do not comply with EU rules. The EU policy approach to tackle vaping products as aggressively as tobacco products only makes this problem worse. Non-compliant products do not tend to be bothered by every stricter regulation.

Von der Leyen is also likely to discuss EU support for Ukraine. She may well steer clear of how to finance it. After Belgium blocked seizure of Russian Central Bank assets held at Euroclear, fearing reputational loss and legal exposure, governments agreed late last year to issue more joint EU debt — a win for highly indebted states such as France and Italy, but still better than a large-scale violation of property rights. Ukraine’s financial needs have reopened the debate, with Sweden, Poland and the Netherlands again demanding seizure. The Commission already backed seizure in 2025; the crisis that followed is a reason for the President not to pick sides between elected governments from the podium.

Age checks, Ceuta and a harder migration line

The President is also expected to unveil plans for EU-wide age restrictions on social media. Restricting children’s access is not the main objection; state-policed verification is. Identifying under-age users requires checking every user, which has led many to fear that governments — or the EU institutions — would gain more control over social media. A demo EU age-verification app was hacked two minutes after launch. In March more than 400 privacy and security researchers wrote to the Commission asking for a moratorium until the science on age-assurance technology settles.

Member states also expect the speech to address events in Ceuta, where tens of thousands of people entered the Spanish exclave illegally, leaving lasting local strain and a wider quarrel with Spain’s left-wing government. Already before the summer the EU consensus on migration had moved towards a stricter approach. Before year-end, Germany, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece aim to negotiate a “return hub” in a non-EU country. Even Madrid slightly toughened its asylum policy in August after the Ceuta influx.

Climate targets and a wary take on AI

Politico notes that the Commission is trying to “defend its 2040 emissions-cutting target while responding to mounting pressure from industry and national capitals to limit the economic cost of the green transition,” against the backdrop of “the damage caused by floods and wildfires over the summer.”

Last month Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg countered similar claims, pointing out that “the global burned area was 41% below normal, and all continents were below average, with Africa, North America, and South America at record lows.” He also stated: “Disasters in France, Spain & Canada are tragic—but climate is global. Cherry-picking isn’t science. Climate policy does near-nothing for fires. We need better fire policy.”

It has also emerged that the Commission wants to retain a separate 2040 renewable energy target, seen as a snub to an alliance of 14 member states that support nuclear energy. All of this shows the Commission’s stance is hardly a reflection of the current policy consensus. It would be concerning if von der Leyen used the speech to resist the push by elected governments to relax the EU’s economically damaging climate policies. An appointed bureaucracy should not pursue its own agenda over that of member states.

Telling, too, is that von der Leyen seems to be preparing action related to artificial intelligence and jobs. Her team has asked officials for fresh statistics on jobs likely to be lost and created as AI spreads. That framing looks hostile at a moment when the EU is missing the boat, in part because of GDPR and the AI Act, as former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi pointed out in his report. One would expect new initiatives to finally ease those innovation-hostile rules. Little has happened beyond talk.

New statistics show that AI has been a net job creator in the United States. If the speech is hunting for a pretext for still tighter rules, that evidence points the other way.

The 2028–2034 budget and “own resources”

Without doubt she will also discuss negotiations on the 2028–2034 budget. The Commission has proposed to largely increase EU spending compared with 2021–2027. She has already confirmed that a demand for nearly 11 billion euro for crisis management will be a key theme, citing “changes in global climate patterns.”

Important in this regard is that the Irish EU Council presidency has just welcomed progress in the talks among EU governments on EU “own resources” to finance the long term EU budget. Last year, the EU Commission had proposed a whole range of such de facto EU taxes.

Reportedly, it thereby singled out two own resources in a note to other EU governments: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a new EU climate tariff, as well as a separate EU levy on non-collected electronic waste. The Irish government thereby noted: “Of the Commission’s proposals for new Own Resources, the most consensual among Member States is CBAM, with many open to increasing the call rate further.” It added that there was also “a broad degree of support” among governments towards the electronic waste tax, which is expected to generate 17.9 billion euro per year. The Commission hopes to maximize the amounts of these levies that will flow to the EU budget.

Noteworthy is that the Irish EU Presidency also wrote that a majority of EU governments oppose a proposed EU corporate levy, fearing that it will undermine competitiveness, and that many governments have criticized a proposed tobacco levy. Member States like Sweden were firmly against the latter from the beginning. In July 2025, Sweden’s Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson branded it as “completely unacceptable.”

In particular, the Swedish government then lamented that the EU Commission wanted to impose significantly higher minimum excise duties on both conventional tobacco products and lower-risk nicotine alternatives. Thereby the markedly different health impacts of the products concerned were being ignored.

A similar less than targeted approach is apparent with the review of the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), which is about regulating those nicotine-based alternatives. In the European Commission however, the success of Sweden continues to be ignored. The country has a record low smoking rate and is able to present lower mortality, correlated with the exemption it enjoys for more than 30 years now from an EU ban on nicotine-based alternatives for traditional smoking. In an article on the policy debate, Euractiv reports that “an EU official called on Sweden not to forget that the EU’s goal is not only to become smoke-free by 2040, but also nicotine-free.”

In any case, Von der Leyen and her officials are now hoping that member states can lock in the long-term budget before next year, when elections in France, Spain and Italy may strengthen the eurosceptic right.

What the speech cannot settle

Carney in the gallery and a Canada deal on the press release will give the afternoon a transatlantic sheen. They will not answer the more awkward questions sitting in the same text: whether an EU age-verification scheme that failed a two-minute security test should be scaled to hundreds of millions of users; whether “own resources” are taxes in all but name; and whether a Commission that still treats nuclear as an afterthought, AI as a jobs threat and Swedish harm-reduction as an inconvenience is listening to the governments that must implement its laws.

Those governments, not the Berlaymont, will face voters in France, Spain and Italy next year. A State of the Union that treats that fact as a scheduling problem rather than a democratic constraint will have missed the point of the exercise.

 

 

Copyright picture: By European People’s Party – EPP Athens, 2-3 December, 2022, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126278869

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