State of the Union, the von del Leyen programme by points

Point by point, the main contents of the European Commission programme outlined by President Ursula von der Leyen during her State of the Union address on Wednesday.

The EU Commission intends to develop a small, affordable car project with industry: 'I believe that Europe should have its own electric car. And as ecological: clean, efficient and light. And as cheap: accessible to everyone. And as European: built here, with European supply chains,' said President Ursula von der Leyen in the chamber. For some time now, the EU executive has organised a meeting tomorrow with representatives of the sector, which is in serious crisis due to competition from China. The EU has decided to ban polluting cars with combustion engines from the road from 2035 onwards. The issue is extremely controversial. Many manufacturers fear that the target is too ambitious and too expensive. There are discussions about revising the regulation, perhaps not so much to correct the 2035 date as to open the door to fuels that are less polluting than petrol or diesel, such as hydrogen, synthetic or biofuels.

The European economic situation continues to be weak, one year after the presentation of the Letta and Draghi reports. In her State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen announced a number of initiatives. The first one concerns the sensitive battery sector. On this front, she intends to make 1.8 billion available to help their production. In addition, she wants public tenders for environmental technologies to require products made in Europe in order to support the growing sector. Finally, he has announced a regulation dedicated to technologically strategic sectors (the Industrial Accelerator Act), with the aim of accelerating research and production in clean tech. On this occasion von der Leyen defended the trade agreement with the US: 'If you take into account the exceptions we have obtained and the additional tariffs that others have to pay, we have the best possible agreement. This, minus the promises of US gas and oil purchases.

In her State of the Union address, the President of the Commission, a doctor by training, warned that 'we are on the brink - or even at the beginning - of another global health crisis'. She thus referred to the scepticism against vaccines that permeates an important section of Western society. She looked in particular at the Trump administration, which is allowing states to remove vaccine requirements: 'I am appalled by the misinformation that threatens global progress on everything from measles to polio. There is a fear that the US choices will reduce the collective immunity that has been built up over the past decades. Consequently, the European Commission will want to make a greater effort to convince people of the importance of vaccines. According to a Yale University study, the Covid-19 vaccine prevented 'more than 18.5 million additional hospitalisations and 3.2 million additional deaths' in the US between December 2020 and November 2022.

The EU executive is aware that EU employment is increasingly characterised by precarious, low-paid, and often temporary jobs. For some time we have been witnessing a thinning of the middle class. In 2024, 93.3 million people were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, or 21% of the EU population. Speaking yesterday in Strasbourg, Ursula von der Leyen assured that she wants to eradicate poverty by 2050. In this sense, she promised initiatives to reduce the cost of living, at least in energy and housing. Among other things, he wants to remove bottlenecks in the European energy network, so as to reduce energy prices. House prices, he added, have risen by an average of 20 per cent since 2015. She pointed out: 'We need to review our state aid rules to allow for measures to support housing. We need to make it much easier to build new houses and student residences."