Eurobloat #0176 • December 2024
December saw a new Commission take office on the thinnest mandate in its history and promptly busy itself with the truly pressing matters of European life: which plug you may use, a trade deal that turned the Union against itself, and a flagship law it had to switch off before switching on.
Folly of the Month: the Union comes for your charger
From 28 December, EU rules made USB-C the mandatory charging port for phones, tablets, cameras, headphones and a long list of other gadgets. There is a certain grandeur to a continent-spanning project of nations deciding that its historic mission, this month, is to standardise the connector on the end of a cable. The proudest achievement Brussels could point to as the year closed was that your next charger will look like everyone else's.
1. A charger frozen into law forever
Critics noted the obvious flaw: enshrine one connector in legislation and you have outlawed whatever better idea comes next. Brussels has mistaken a snapshot of 2024 technology for the end of history.
2. A new Commission, the slimmest mandate ever
The "von der Leyen II" Commission took office on 1 December, confirmed in November by the narrowest majority any Commission has ever scraped together. A weaker centre, more beholden to the right, settled in for five more years.
3. A trade deal that turned the Union on itself
On 6 December von der Leyen clinched the Mercosur agreement with South America, and immediately set France, its farmers and a bloc of member states against Germany and Spain. A "single" market that erupts into open warfare the moment a deal is signed is single in name only.
4. Farmers in the streets, again
French and other farmers protested furiously, fearing the deal would undercut them with imports held to looser standards than Brussels imposes at home. The Union writes rules its own producers must obey, then signs away their market to those who need not.
5. The deforestation law, switched off before launch
Brussels agreed to delay its flagship deforestation regulation by a year, days before it was due to bite. A law that must be postponed to stop it causing chaos was, by definition, not ready to be a law.
6. The e-waste alibi
The charger mandate was sold as saving some 11,000 tonnes of e-waste a year, the tidy figure that justifies Brussels reaching into your gadget drawer. Whether a continent's parliaments should be legislating plug shapes at all was, naturally, not the question asked.
7. Even the one-charger dream needs carve-outs
Laptops, it turned out, were exempted until 2026, so even the great unification of the cable arrives with an asterisk. The simplest of mandates cannot survive contact with reality intact.
8. A bloc that cannot agree on a trade deal or a plug
Mercosur laid bare the unbridgeable split between the EU's free-traders and its protectionists. The project that markets itself as Europe speaking with one voice spent December unable to agree on almost anything except the charger.
9. Priorities, in miniature
A new executive, a fractured trade deal, an unworkable green law, and the headline win of the month was the connector on your phone. If you wanted a portrait of the project's sense of proportion, December painted it.
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