The environmental policy spokesman for the EPP group in the European Parliament, Peter Liese (CDU), fears that the German attitude towards the end of combustion engines in Brussels will cause a lot of damage. In an interview with Bayern 2, he said: “Many EU member states are rightly angry at the way the traffic lights are making hoo and hott here and are carrying their internal dispute to Europe.”
According to Liese, the back and forth is not well received in Brussels. In terms of content, he supports the position of Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP), namely for synthetic fuels and climate neutrality. That is why he has voted four times in the last year and a half against the proposal to phase out combustion engines from 2035.
Wissing: “Then he shouldn’t have agreed”
“Mr. Wissing voted in favor three times: last year in June, in October and in November. And that’s why it’s very surprising that he’s now holding up the entire process, where everything is actually finished. (…) If it had been so important to him, he shouldn’t have agreed.”
Liese fears that this behavior could also harm Germany in the EU in the future. “You always meet twice. At some point Germany will urgently need legislation and others will refer to this precedent and say: No, it says so and so, but we don’t want that anymore, we’ve changed our minds.”
“Wissing will have caused a lot of political damage”
Liese does not expect an agreement on this issue at the EU summit in Brussels that begins today. “Nothing will happen today. This dispute will overshadow the EU summit,” he said. At the summit, decisions can only ever be made unanimously, and since Italy and Bulgaria are also against it, there will be no agreement. Instead, there will perhaps be a little discussion on the sidelines and then there will be “sometime in the next few days a face-saving solution for Mr. Wissing”.
However, this will not reliably save the combustion engine, according to Liese. “So he will have caused a lot of political damage and achieved little for the car industry, for German drivers.”
