Debate: Competition policy - annual report
Date: MONDAY, 12 JUNE 2023
Speaker: René Repasi
Country: Netherlands
Language: EN

Briefly, we must move away from a narrow understanding of consumer welfare as the basis of competition law. You must understand that competition policy cannot be pursued in isolation, but is embedded in an economic and social context and is committed to all Union goals. And most importantly, we must protect the integrity of the internal market by all means. We should never forget what is the beating heart of European integration that is securing our peace and welfare. It is the internal market being a place in which large and small economies can compete with each other on the basis of merits and not of fiscal capacity.  We have enough of national public money injected into national economies that disturb the balance within the internal market. Yet, we definitely need more public investments, but not at the expense of our internal market. Any relaxation of State aid rules must be accompanied by an equally strong European fund that is accessible for fiscally weak Member States, otherwise, we risk losing our internal market over it.  The functioning of some markets is cursed by the bigness of the main players on it. Without committing abuses of their dominant position, these players have distorted the structure of the markets to such an extent that innovation is suffocated and competition by merit is suspended. It is competition policy’s most noble task to address this curse of bigness in order to achieve innovation and competition based on merits. We need healthy market structures that allow smaller competitors to enter a market, to survive the entry and to grow. That is the formula that underlies the success of the internal market and should not be dumped by policy initiatives that intend to govern by setting reference values which are then to be achieved by all means. A competition policy that protects market structures, needs tools to act against the dominant market player distorting markets without its behaviour meeting the threshold of abusive behaviour. It requires the use of structural remedies and to split up dominant undertakings. We need to be bold and create a legal basis for unbundling measures already in situations where such unbundling would improve conditions for competition significantly. It requires a merger control that protects innovative undertakings from being killed by a merger with large companies. Let us be clear, when the Court of Justice does not confirm the Commission’s current way of dealing with killer acquisitions, we need to revise the merger regulation.  Finally, I believe that competition policy has a role to play in tackling inflation. In the recent monetary dialogue with the European Parliament, the ECB president, Christine Lagarde, confirmed our view that there is sellers’ inflation, and that is, I quote, ‘perfectly called for (for) competition authorities to look into excessive prices, driving inflation’.  Dear colleagues, competition policy has to evolve from a policy that is mainly concerned by consumer welfare to a policy that untangles the curse of bigness, ensures the level playing field of our internal market and shapes competitive market structures.