30 June 2026 – Steel quotas delayed? Once again, the Commission misses a self-imposed deadline – and in doing so proves where its real priorities lie. Indonesia: still no decision on the 2026 RKAB quota.
Update: Breaking: Steel Quotas Published in the Official Journal at the Last Minute
Steel Quotas Delayed, Priorities Wrong: Brussels’ Systematic Administrative Failure
Once again, the Commission misses a self-imposed deadline – and in doing so proves where its real priorities lie.
A Delay We Had Predicted
As early as October 2025, we expected that the European Commission would fail to publish the new country-specific import quotas for steel on time. Today we can report: the Commission has fully met our expectation. As usual in Brussels, they were “always making an effort.”
The quotas should have appeared no later than today’s update in the Official Journal of the EU. Even publication at the very last minute would already have caused considerable damage to the domestic economy – companies need lead time to adjust to new trade rules. But the Commission has not even delivered that.
A Familiar Pattern
Reasonable lead times had already become impossible with CBAM because the Commission was unable to implement the project on time, either technically or politically. Now the same process is repeating itself with the steel quotas. This is no longer an isolated case – it is a structural pattern of administrative overconfidence that regularly confronts the European economy with reality, while Brussels fails to meet its own timelines.
The Commission’s Wrong Priorities Are Plain to See
While the steel quotas remain nowhere to be found, the tariff-rate quotas from the EU-U.S. trade agreement were published today on time and “early.” That shows where the real priorities lie in Brussels: diplomatic obligations towards Washington are met – while the domestic industry, whose competitiveness is already being stripped away through tariffs, quotas, and artificial price increases, is left waiting.
Anyone who builds a trade protection system that burdens their own companies with uncertainty while processing international agreements on schedule has missed the real task: creating planning certainty for the economy they supposedly want to protect.
Indonesia: Still No Decision on the 2026 RKAB Quota
Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, ESDM, has made clear that no decision has yet been taken on the level of the 2026 nickel mining quota, RKAB. Director General Tri Winarno emphasized on Thursday that the ministry is still reviewing submitted amendment applications – there is no automatic easing of the quotas.
This repeats a pattern we had already described in our article “Nickel Market: Zero Line and a Perfectly Timed Rumor”. Once again, market rumors circulated about a possible RKAB adjustment – and once again, an official denial followed promptly. The timing again points more towards targeted price influence than reliable information.
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