Eurobloat #0191 • March 2026
March found the project busy at its favourite hobby, centralisation, dreaming up a twenty-eighth kind of company to sit above the member states, while finally stumbling towards the border control it had spent decades deriding, and conceding that its much-trumpeted AI Act could not actually be obeyed on time.
Folly of the Month: now incorporating, EU Inc.
On 18 March the Commission proposed a "28th regime", a brand-new EU-wide company form to sit on top of the twenty-seven that the member states already run perfectly well. The supposed cure for twenty-seven sets of company law is, naturally, a twenty-eighth, written in Brussels and layered over the lot. It is centralisation sold as convenience: another rung of law, another reason for power to drift from the capitals to the centre, and another solution in search of a problem.
→ ey.com
1. Border control at last, by the most graceless route imaginable
On 26 March the Parliament voted to let member states build "return hubs" outside the Union and to remove failed asylum seekers to them. Restoring control of the borders is sensible and overdue; the spectacle is the Union that spent twenty years calling such measures xenophobic now lurching to the opposite extreme overnight, with no apparent memory of its earlier sermons.
2. Brussels picks the winners
New industrial measures unveiled on 4 March would impose local-content requirements on large foreign investments in steel, batteries, solar and the rest. The single market sold as openness now arrives with a "buy European" clause and a planner in Brussels deciding who deserves to invest.
3. The world-beating AI Act, postponed by its own author
Parliament backed delaying key AI Act rules to 2027. Easing off a law that threatened to throttle European innovation is the right instinct; the embarrassment is that Brussels lectured the planet about its gold standard and then could not bring itself to switch the thing on.
4. Meanwhile, the great war on "nudifier" apps
In the same session the Parliament found time to back a ban on "nudifier" apps. It is reassuring to know the continent's finest legislative minds are deployed exactly where they are needed least.
5. More cybersecurity rules atop the cybersecurity rules
The Commission floated further NIS2 reforms, including new ransomware-reporting duties, before the existing directive is even fully in place. Why wait for a rule to bed in when you can amend it first.
6. Another decade, another consultation
On 20 March the Commission opened a four-week call for evidence and a twelve-week consultation on the post-2030 renewable energy framework. Democracy, in Brussels, increasingly means filling in a form and waiting for the form to ignore you.
7. The Union will decide which adjectives you may use
Under the Empowering Consumers regime, generic claims such as "eco-friendly" and "sustainable" will be banned unless blessed by an approved scheme. Brussels has progressed from regulating products to regulating vocabulary.
8. Ready to ring the Taliban, in your name
The returns law expressly permits cooperation with non-recognised regimes, prompting one MEP to warn it gave a green light to dealing with the Taliban to force Afghans back. There is a serious way to control a border, and there is whatever this is.
9. The green rulebook nobody can keep up with
On 17 March the Commission published yet more draft revisions to the EU taxonomy's climate and environmental delegated acts, the latest rewrite of a sustainability rulebook that changes faster than any business can comply. The rules on what counts as green are themselves not built to last.
→ kpmg.com
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