Written question – EU industrial priorities: will the Commission acknowledge mistakes and take real action to save the European steel sector? – E-001863/2025

Question for written answer  E-001863/2025
to the Commission
Rule 144
Piotr Müller (ECR)

For years, the Commission has stood passively by as Europe has deindustrialised, imposing costly regulations and ignoring the consequences of China’s increasing industrial overproduction and the US’s recent tightening of customs policy aimed at protecting its heavy industry. Now, facing pressures from rising unemployment, dependence on external suppliers and the threat of losing industrial sovereignty, the Commission is trying to save the steel sector, which employs more than 300 000 EU citizens.

I would therefore like to ask three specific questions, which require equally specific answers:

• 1.Is the Commission prepared to explicitly acknowledge that its current regulatory approach – lacking any effective mechanisms to protect strategic industry – has contributed to the loss of production capacity and has deepened Europe’s dependence on external economic powers?
• 2.In light of the facts (mass lay-offs, steelworks closures, falling exports and growing trade deficits), will the Commission acknowledge that maintaining industrial production in the EU must become an absolute priority, even if it means having to adapt the decarbonisation agenda?
• 3.Will the Commission review the application of the Emissions Trading System (ETS) to the steel industry and consider temporarily suspending or permanently modifying it, given that, as currently designed, the ETS makes it impossible in practice for European steel producers to compete with operators outside the EU?

Submitted: 8.5.2025