11 September 2026 – Buy European: Stéphane Séjourné presented the Public Procurement Act on 9 September and invited the press to read the impact assessment. According to him, it found “no possible price increase”. That statement could become a problem for the Executive Vice President. Unlike Mr Séjourné, we have actually read the impact assessment.
Buy European: The Damage Would Be Immense, but Séjourné Denies It
Stéphane Séjourné presented the Public Procurement Act on 9 September and invited the press to read the impact assessment. According to him, it found “no possible price increase”. That statement could become a problem for the Executive Vice President, because unlike Mr Séjourné, we have actually read the impact assessment.
Made in EU Costs the Construction Sector €1.6 Billion
The JRC, the EU’s Joint Research Centre, used FIDELIO, the reference model for EU industrial policy, to simulate the effects of an 85 per cent Made in EU quota for steel and aluminium in public construction contracts.
The result for 2025 to 2030: steel and aluminium production gains €331 million in value added. The construction sector loses €1.6 billion. For every euro of value created by the preference further up the value chain, €4.86 is destroyed further down.
The Commission provides the explanation itself: “the higher price of EU produced steel”. That is written in SWD(2026) 592, the Commission’s own Staff Working Document. The two tables are separated by just two pages. Nowhere does the Commission calculate the net result. And Séjourné shows that he is either unfamiliar with his own staff working document, is simply lying, or does not hold his post on the basis of his expertise.
Impact Assessment, Public Procurement Act
Winner: ArcelorMittal. Losers: Zagreb, Budapest, Bucharest
Almost one third of the gain goes to Germany, €106 million. In relative terms, Luxembourg benefits most, which the Commission explicitly attributes to the presence of ArcelorMittal. In the parallel simulation for electronics, it states that the measure would consolidate “the position of a limited number of EU industrial leaders”, with Germany as the main beneficiary. There is no clearer way to describe corporate and clientelist politics.
The East pays the bill. Croatia loses 3.74 per cent of value added in construction, Hungary 1.54 per cent and Romania 1.47 per cent. The reason, according to the Commission, is their high dependence on steel from third countries. Croatia gains €0.1 million upstream and loses €74 million downstream. Romania gains €5 million and loses €131 million. Buy European at the raw materials stage means redistribution from the construction sectors of cohesion countries to the blast furnaces of major steel producers.
In three out of four simulations, the public sector itself also picks up the bill: hospitals, schools and public administrations. The French healthcare sector loses €161 million in medical technology, while the Czech education sector loses €47 million in communications technology.
The Scrutiny Board Had Warned Them
The Regulatory Scrutiny Board criticised precisely this on 15 April: costs, competition and prices had not been assessed adequately, and proportionality had not been demonstrated. The Commission revised the assessment and, according to its own response, did so “notably in relation to ESI options”. In other words, not in relation to the European preference. Yet the Commission itself calculates that every additional bid reduces the price of a public contract by 2.5 per cent. And then it presents an instrument designed to exclude bids.
To be fair, the simulation examined a binding 85 per cent quota, not the voluntary preference under the horizontal framework. But those are precisely the binding quotas Séjourné has announced for the sectoral legislation. “Ceci est le chapeau”, he says. “This is the hat.” He knows the bill underneath that hat. He simply did not mention it.
A Commissioner who, in his own annex, acknowledges losses of 1.6 billion euros to the construction industry alone, yet tells the press there will be “no price rises”, has either not read the document or is banking on the fact that no one else will. Both of these factors disqualify Stéphane Séjourné, the Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy at the European Commission – whose resignation, viewed objectively and fairly, is long overdue.
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