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The reaction to a Taiwan Coast Guard confrontation reflects the existence of a particularly hardline strand of opinion on Taiwan among mainland Chinese.

La candidate du RN à l’élection présidentielle a présenté ce mardi la trajectoire financière qu’elle entend viser si elle accède à l’Élysée en mai prochain, détaillant plusieurs mesures économiques.

Des internautes accusent l’armée française d’avoir déployé des blindés pour réprimer ces derniers jours les manifestations des lycéens qui demandent l'amélioration de leurs conditions de scolarité. Mais les vidéos censées apporter les preuves de leur déploiement sont trompeuses.

La République démocratique du Congo (RDC), l’Angola et la Zambie veulent accélérer la mise en œuvre du corridor de Lobito. La deuxième réunion de coordination de haut niveau consacrée à ce projet s’est ouverte lundi 5 octobre à Lusaka, en Zambie, en présence notamment de la Banque mondiale, de la Banque africaine de développement (BAD) et d’autres partenaires.

On 9 September 2026, the European Commission proposed an EU Public Procurement Act. When it comes to infrastructure, harmonised rules, and a once-only eligibility system would cut the cost of bidding across borders. Award decisions would weigh quality and origin alongside price, and a cap on turnover requirements would widen access for smaller firms. Security-of-supply obligations would move resilience from strategy papers into contracts that lenders can underwrite, while tighter concession rules would close grey areas in operating risk and contract modifications. Equal treatment for candidate countries would extend the EU’s reach into the Western Balkans. The text of the Regulation still has to pass through Parliament, the Council, and trilogue negotiations, so it may change substantially. Even so, it shows where the EU wants to go: the roughly €600 billion a year spent under EU-wide procurement rules is re-thought as a lever for advancing the EU’s long-sought goals of strategic autonomy and economic sovereignty. But that ambition comes at a cost: European preference and diversified supply chains typically mean higher bids, which will need to be priced into project debt and—ultimately—recovered from taxpayers.

Read here in pdf the Policy Paper by Vasiliki Poula, DPhil candidate, Department of International Development, University of Oxford; Editorial director, 1830 lab.

ON THE 9TH OF SEPTEMBER, THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION PROPOSED a new EU Public Procurement Act. Envisioned as a Regulation, if adopted, the framework would apply directly and identically across every Member State, with no national transposition required. But getting there means passing through the EU’s ordinary legislative procedure first: the text will need to go simultaneously to the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, each of which can amend it substantially. Once each side has its own negotiating position, informal three-way talks between Parliament, Council and the Commission – trilogues – thrash out a compromise text, which is typically where the most consequential changes happen: provisions in a Commission proposal are routinely watered down, tightened, or dropped altogether by the time trilogues conclude. Only once negotiators agree do Parliament and Council formally adopt the final text. For a Regulation this size, a year or more between proposal and final adoption would be a realistic expectation. And the proposal itself specifies that the Regulation would only start applying two years after that. In other words: it is highly unlikely that anything below will take effect within the next three years, and none of it is guaranteed to survive the long legislative journey in its current form. Still, the first proposal sets the tone for everything that follows, and for a proposal that affects such a key part of the EU economy, it is worth taking the time to decode the direction of the key changes it could bring.

Public procurement accounts for roughly 15% of EU GDP – around €2.5 trillion a year, spent by more than 250,000 public authorities across the bloc.

Public procurement accounts for roughly 15% of EU GDP – around €2.5 trillion a year, spent by more than 250,000 public authorities across the bloc, in sectors as varied as energy, transport, healthcare, education, waste management, and social protection. Most of that spending is governed by national rules. EU-wide procurement law, i.e. the law that the new Act wants to change, only kicks in once a contract crosses a specific value threshold: €5.4 million for works contracts and concessions, and lower thresholds ranging from roughly €140,000 to €432,000 for supply and service contracts, depending on the type of buyer. The Commission’s own estimates put what actually falls above those thresholds, and therefore under EU-wide rules, at around a quarter of total public spending – an average of roughly €600 billion a year.

Infrastructure is only one slice of that €600 billion covered by EU-wide rules, but it’s a very consequential one: infrastructure deals are long-lived and capital-intensive.

Infrastructure is only one slice of that €600 billion covered by EU-wide rules, but it’s a very consequential one: infrastructure deals are long-lived and capital-intensive. Buying office supplies or a batch of vaccines is usually a straightforward transaction – money changes hands, the goods get delivered, the contract closes. Building a motorway or a water-treatment plant doesn’t work that way because the upfront cost is too large. As such, debt plays a key role in infrastructure procurement – be it the state that needs to borrow to fund a contractor directly, or the contractor that builds first and recoups the cost slowly, over decades, through concessions. Public procurement for infrastructure, more than almost any other category of public spending, is really an exercise in managing debt – and how a contract is designed, what risk it assigns and to whom, is what determines how that debt gets priced. This piece examines the proposed Public Procurement Act through a specific lens: six ways it could reshape how EU infrastructure actually gets financed.

One set of rules, one place to find them

It is proposed that the 2014 works, services, utilities, and concessions Directives are collapsed into a single, directly-applicable Regulation. This is important because a directive sets an objective and leaves each Member State to write its own national law to achieve it; a regulation is binding word-for-word across all 27 countries from the moment it applies. For a lender structuring debt that will be syndicated across several jurisdictions, or a contractor bidding in multiple national markets, that divergence bears significant cost as legal opinions have to be obtained country by country, given that an arrangement that works cleanly in one Member State can’t simply be assumed to work the same way in the next.

…a common digital ecosystem built on an interoperability network and shared semantic standards lets public buyers and companies using different national systems to communicate through the same digital infrastructure.

A Commission-run eProcurement platform consolidates this harmonisation operationally: a common digital ecosystem built on an interoperability network and shared semantic standards lets public buyers and companies using different national systems to communicate through the same digital infrastructure, rather than each country running its own disconnected version of the process. Part of this ecosystem is an ‘electronic eligibility service’ built around the once-only principle: in practice, this means a company uploads its core credentials (proof of financial standing, tax and social security compliance, professional registration, and so on) a single time, into a verified digital profile, rather than re-assembling and resubmitting that same paperwork for every tender it enters. Right now, a contractor bidding on ten concessions across five countries effectively has to prove it is a legitimate, solvent, compliant company ten separate times, often in ten slightly different formats. Under the once-only principle, that verification happens once, and every public buyer across the EU can draw on the same underlying record, turning a repeated administrative burden into a one-time step.

…it is worth resisting the temptation to read this as simply a win for smaller players against larger ones, because the more interesting fault line here probably isn’t size per se but whether a company is oriented outward or inward to begin with. 

This favours smaller firms specifically, since a fixed compliance cost weighs more heavily on a company with no in-house legal team than on a large multinational contractor for whom it’s a rounding error. And there’s a second potential beneficiary: the internal market itself, extended to a part of it that has always lagged behind, as cross-border participation in EU infrastructure procurement has stayed stubbornly low. This is largely because infrastructure work depends on a home-field advantage: relationships with local subcontractors, familiarity with a country’s planning and permitting culture, political capital with regional authorities who often control the pipeline of future work. A shared eligibility system and a common data layer might dent that home bias by removing one of the costs of finding out what’s out there and proving you’re fit to bid on it. But it is worth resisting the temptation to read this as simply a win for smaller players against larger ones, because the more interesting fault line here probably isn’t size per se but whether a company is oriented outward or inward to begin with. A mid-sized Portuguese contractor that has never looked past its own borders doesn’t suddenly start bidding in Romania because the paperwork got easier; the paperwork was never really what was stopping it. The firms best placed to benefit from lower administrative friction are the ones that already had cross-border ambitions but were held back by exactly this kind of fixed cost – and, in practice, this category may include large, well-capitalised players expanding into new markets just as easily as it includes small ones. It will be worth watching which of the two effects turns out to dominate: already-outward-looking large contractors adding a sixth or seventh country to their list, or inward-looking small firms trying for their first cross-border contract.

Winning a tender now depends on more than the lowest price

Contracts would now be awarded on ‘best price-quality ratio’ as the default method, with a mandatory minimum quality weighting – 30% of the score, rising to 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Examples of criteria span several different areas: technical merit, aesthetic and functional characteristics, accessibility, and production methods; environmental and climate considerations, social considerations, and innovation objectives; the qualifications and experience of the staff actually assigned to the contract; and after-sales service, technical assistance, and delivery timing.

…when price alone decides a tender, the winner is often whoever made the most optimistic assumptions, not whoever can actually deliver.

The problem this targets is straightforward: when price alone decides a tender, the winner is often whoever made the most optimistic assumptions, not whoever can actually deliver – and on an infrastructure contract running twenty or thirty years, that gap between the winning bid and reality tends to surface only after the ink is dry. But a quality score is a judgement call in a way a price comparison never is, and judgement calls are easier to steer. Some of the quality criteria, like staff qualifications, technical merit, delivery timelines, are close to objectively verifiable: you can check a CV, confirm a delivery date was met on a past project, compare a technical specification against a standard. Others – aesthetic characteristics, ‘production methods’, broadly framed sustainability considerations – are closer to matters of taste or policy preference.

The proposal attaches two safeguards to manage that risk of bias. The first separates the price and quality assessments procedurally, so evaluators score technical merit before they know – or before that knowledge can colour their scoring – what a bidder has charged for it; in theory this stops a favoured bidder’s higher price from being retrofitted into a higher quality score to make the numbers work out in its favour. The second is a ‘four-eyes’ requirement: no single evaluator’s judgement stands alone – a second reviewer has to sign off. Both are reasonable, standard-issue anti-corruption tools.

The procedural separation of price and quality scoring faces the same limitation: it stops a bidder’s price from contaminating the quality score, but it does nothing to verify that the quality score was actually right.

But with infrastructure, corruption may not be the largest source of scoring error at all – an honest, technically wrong judgement might matter more, and neither safeguard is really built to catch that. A four-eyes rule assumes the second evaluator brings something the first one lacks. That assumption holds well against corruption, because a bribe or a conflict of interest is, by definition, private to one person; a second reviewer with no stake in the outcome is genuinely likely to notice what the first one missed. It mitigates much less well against a technical misjudgment, because the two evaluators scoring a motorway’s structural design, or a water-treatment plant’s long-term maintenance plan, are typically drawn from the same professional pool, trained in the same standards, exposed to the same industry assumptions about what ‘resilient’ or ‘durable’ looks like. The procedural separation of price and quality scoring faces the same limitation: it stops a bidder’s price from contaminating the quality score, but it does nothing to verify that the quality score was actually right.

Origin is another feature that now weighs more critically on winning a tender – though this isn’t entirely new territory. A narrower version already existed under Article 85 of the old utilities directive: buyers in water, energy, transport, and postal services could already reject a supply tender where non-EU content exceeded 50% of its value, and could already give preference to an EU bid over a non-EU one, provided the price gap was within 3%. What the proposed Act does is take that mechanism out of its corner.

In practice, public buyers get three separate tools for factoring origin into the competition. They can fold it directly into the quality track: awarding extra points for EU or ‘covered’ origin (meaning operators from the EU, or from a country whose trade agreement or GPA membership specifically extends EU procurement rights to it). These points sit inside the same 30-to-50% weighting as technical merit and staff experience. Or they can apply the preference on the price side instead. A public buyer might set a discount percentage in advance – for example, specifying that EU or covered-origin bids will be treated, for scoring purposes only, as if they cost 10% less than they actually do. Bidders then submit their real prices as normal. Picture two bidders on a motorway concession: Bidder A, fully EU-sourced, quotes €100 million; Bidder B, with less than half its content from covered sources, quotes a cheaper €95 million. When the authority compares the bids, it doesn’t use A’s real €100 million – it uses the discounted figure, €90 million, purely to rank the two against each other. That’s enough to put A ahead of B in the price comparison, even though A’s actual quote was higher. But if A wins the contract, it gets paid the €100 million it actually quoted, as the discounted €90 million never appears anywhere outside the scoring exercise. Crucially, too, this doesn’t stop a non-covered bid from competing. Had B quoted €85 million instead of €95 million, that 10% discount on A’s price would not have closed that gap, and B would have won.

Or the buyer can skip scoring altogether and set a hard gate unrelated to either of the above: they might stipulate, for instance, that tenders whose covered content falls below 50% of the total value can be rejected outright, before price or quality even come into it. Unlike the discount, this isn’t something a strong bid can offset: a tender that would have won easily on price can still be thrown out.

Tilting the scales toward EU or covered-origin bidders is a response to a real concern that critical infrastructure should not quietly become dependent on capital the EU has limited leverage over.

Tilting the scales toward EU or covered-origin bidders is a response to a real concern that critical infrastructure should not quietly become dependent on capital the EU has limited leverage over, especially in sectors where a disruption years down the line would be expensive or dangerous. But the same tilt raises the price of that protection, and infrastructure is precisely the sector where that price compounds over time. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how aggressively individual public buyers actually use these tools, sector by sector, contract by contract.

A cap on how much financial capacity a public buyer can demand

Public buyers can still ask bidders to prove financial standing through, for example, a minimum annual turnover, a minimum turnover in the specific area the contract covers, an acceptable ratio between assets and liabilities, or professional indemnity insurance. What’s new is a ceiling: the minimum turnover requirement can no longer exceed 50% of the estimated annual contract value, except in specifically justified cases tied to unusual risk.

A turnover requirement set disproportionately high relative to a contract’s actual value is one of the more straightforward, and most easily fixable, reasons a smaller firm never makes it to the bidding stage.

That ceiling is a direct response to a problem the Commission’s own evaluation of the current rules has already documented. Competition has declined over the past decade or so, with the share of tenders attracting only a single bid rising and the average number of bidders falling. Cross-border participation specifically has remained persistently limited. SMEs, for their part, actually win a healthy share of contracts by number – around 71% –, but a much smaller share by value – at 55%. This means they compete well for smaller work and remain largely absent from the biggest, highest-value tenders – which is precisely the category most large infrastructure deals fall into. A turnover requirement set disproportionately high relative to a contract’s actual value is one of the more straightforward, and most easily fixable, reasons a smaller firm never makes it to the bidding stage.

This matters more in infrastructure than almost anywhere else in procurement, because of how these projects are actually delivered. A large motorway or water-treatment concession is never built by a single prime contractor working alone, but by a pyramid of subcontractors several layers deep, many of them small, specialised, and regionally rooted. A turnover bar set arbitrarily high at the top of the tender doesn’t just filter the prime bidder, it indirectly constrains how far down that pyramid the eventual winner can afford to reach, and how many of those smaller firms can access the working capital needed to participate at all. Capping the bar at 50% doesn’t hand an SME the capital it always needs, nor does it change the fact that a firm still has to be creditworthy enough to get bonded in the first place. But this new rule does remove one specific, avoidable barrier: a turnover bar set well above what the actual contract risk justifies.

Security of supply now has a price tag

For contracts touching upon entities a Member State has formally identified as critical – under the EU’s existing Critical Entities Resilience Directive across sectors the proposal names explicitly: energy, transport, health, digital infrastructure, water, food and agriculture, financial-market infrastructure – public buyers are now expected to write resilience and security-of-supply requirements directly into the contract itself. The text is specific about what that can mean in practice: diversification of the supply chain, a multi-source sourcing approach, geographic diversification of production, explicit limits on dependency on a single third country or a single third-country operator, certification demonstrating that a tenderer’s supply chain can actually maintain continuity under stress.

Under the new rules, the public buyer can require the winning bidder to show, in writing, a multi-source plan or a certified continuity arrangement, turning the policy concern into a specific, auditable obligation sitting inside the contract itself.

Picture what this looks like on an actual project – say, a grid operator awarding a contract to upgrade transmission infrastructure, where a large share of the specialised transformers and components available on the market come from a small number of suppliers concentrated in one non-EU country. Before this provision, a public buyer evaluating that tender had no specific legal hook requiring the bidder to document how it would keep the project running if that supplier relationship broke down due to a trade dispute, an export restriction, or a company going under. The concern existed, but it lived in strategy documents such as the EU Economic Security Strategy and sector-specific white papers: material a credit analyst might read for context, but would not find among the actual legal terms of the deal being financed. Under the new rules, the public buyer can require the winning bidder to show, in writing, a multi-source plan or a certified continuity arrangement, turning the policy concern into a specific, auditable obligation sitting inside the contract itself.

That distinction matters financially in a very direct way: a lender doesn’t underwrite a strategy document, it underwrites a contract. Once a documented sourcing-diversification obligation sits inside the legal terms, a bank evaluating the deal has something concrete to check against – proof of a second supplier, a certified continuity plan – rather than having to independently assess supply-chain risk itself and price in uncertainty. A concession carrying that documentation is, in credit terms, a genuinely different instrument from one that doesn’t, holding the underlying demand and cost risk equal.

A diversified supply chain – a second, more expensive supplier kept on standby, components sourced from a costlier but less concentrated market – typically costs more upfront than the cheapest available option.

None of this is free, however, and the trade-off runs in the same direction as it does with European preference. A diversified supply chain – a second, more expensive supplier kept on standby, components sourced from a costlier but less concentrated market – typically costs more upfront than the cheapest available option, as the cheapest option is often cheapest precisely because it is concentrated in one place. That additional cost doesn’t disappear once it is written into the contract; it gets financed like everything else in this piece – priced into the debt and ultimately recovered from whoever pays for the project over its lifetime.

Fewer blind spots in concession public contracts

When a public authority – a national, regional or local government, or a public body like a water utility – wants, let’s say, to build a motorway, there are two main ways it can pay for it: The public authority can pay the constructor a fee, like it does when it buys anything else – straightforward, but it means the public authority carries the full risk if the project goes wrong. Or the public authority can let a private company build it, and that private company then collects money directly from the people who use it – in the form of tolls, water bills, parking fees etc. – for years or decades, keeping that revenue for itself. This second arrangement is called a concession and it’s how a huge share of Europe’s infrastructure actually gets financed. For this to work, someone has to decide who absorbs the loss if the revenue collected doesn’t end up covering the costs of building and running the infrastructure. This is what EU law calls ‘operating risk’, and whether a deal carries enough of it is what makes it a concession rather than an ordinary contract.

The current rule, written into a 2014 EU law, says a deal only counts as a concession if there is a real possibility the private company might not get its money back. The law’s own wording is that the company must not be ‘guaranteed to recoup the investments made […] under normal operating conditions’, and that any possible loss must be real, ‘not merely nominal or negligible’. Obviously, infrastructure deals are too varied for a single numeric threshold to capture what ‘enough risk’ looks like across all of them, and EU law has always left the test deliberately flexible. The new Public Procurement Act keeps that flexibility, but closes a few gaps courts have been arguing over.

First, the 2014 text limits its definition of risk to precisely two categories: ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ risk. This bites in practice because not every infrastructure deal’s risk looks like classic demand risk (e.g. will enough drivers use the road?) or supply risk (e.g. will inputs cost more than expected?). Some concessions are structured so the operator’s payment depends on whether the asset is actually available and usable, regardless of how many people use it. Others turn on whether the operator hit contracted quality or service standards, or on whether equipment and systems performed as specified. None of that maps cleanly onto ‘demand’ or ‘supply’. The new text replaces this binary wording with an open list of risks, explicitly framed as non-exhaustive but illustrative: demand, revenue, cost, availability, technical conditions, performance. This sharpens the definition of what counts as risk in the first place, but it leaves the separate question – how much of it is enough – untouched, and this is exactly where the following change comes in.

This prevents the public buyer dressing up a contract to look risk-heavy through clauses unrelated to the actual infrastructure, in order to qualify for concession treatment without genuinely transferring the operational risk that concession status is supposed to reflect.

Second, the Act adds a threshold with no equivalent in the 2014 text: the risk transferred must be one ‘to which the public buyer would be exposed if it was to execute the works or perform the services itself’. That is, a risk only counts as genuine operating risk if it’s the kind of exposure inherent to actually running the infrastructure; the kind the state itself would face if it did the job directly. That would filter out risks a contract assigns to the concessionaire that have nothing to do with running the service itself – a currency-risk clause, say, tied to how the private operator chose to finance its own participation, rather than to anything about operating a toll road or a water utility. This prevents the public buyer dressing up a contract to look risk-heavy through clauses unrelated to the actual infrastructure, in order to qualify for concession treatment without genuinely transferring the operational risk that concession status is supposed to reflect.

A documented risk assessment means that if a competitor challenges the award, or if an auditor asks whether public money was handled properly, the authority has a paper trail showing how it reached its decision. 

Third, a risk assessment is now required before the contract is awarded. Public authorities must identify the main risks and record how they’re split between the parties, rather than leaving that question to be worked out later if a dispute arises. A documented risk assessment means that if a competitor challenges the award, or if an auditor asks whether public money was handled properly, the authority has a paper trail showing how it reached its decision. And from the side of the private sector, a documented risk assessment gives a lender an actual reference point for how risk was allocated, so they no longer have to infer it from the contract’s wording and hope a court will read it the same way later – which is exactly the kind of uncertainty that gets built into the interest rate as a margin of safety.

By banning hidden backstops outright, the rule also creates a level playing field: a company expecting a tacit bailout can bid more aggressively than one which prices in real risk, and win the contract for reasons that have nothing to do with who would actually build or run the road better.

The idea that a concession’s length should roughly coincide with the time needed to recover the investment already existed, with durationestimated up front on the basis of expected demand, costs, and a reasonable return. What’s new is an explicit statement that this estimate cannot come with a built-in safety net (e.g. an automatic extension or a revenue top-up) ‘result[ing] in a guarantee that the concessionaire will obtain a predetermined or minimum return’, closing off the workaround where a ‘concession’ behaves like a government-backed loan. As such, off-balance-sheet liabilities that only surface years later as a fiscal problem are more adequately prevented. By banning hidden backstops outright, the rule also creates a level playing field: a company expecting a tacit bailout can bid more aggressively than one which prices in real risk, and win the contract for reasons that have nothing to do with who would actually build or run the road better.

This makes it harder for a contract to be gradually rewritten in ways that would have looked bad, or been challenged, if the changes were made all at once and out in the open. 

The cap on how much a contract can be modified without a fresh competitive process – 50% of the initial value – already existed. But a new rule is introduced: once the cumulative value of modifications (even when they individually amount to less than 50%) crosses 50% of the original contract, the authority must publish a justification for the total change. This doesn’t reopen competition in itself, but it is aimed at catching contracts that get rebuilt on the quiet through a series of small, technically legal steps, where no single step is big enough to require a new procedure but the sum of them substantively is. This makes it harder for a contract to be gradually rewritten in ways that would have looked bad, or been challenged, if the changes were made all at once and out in the open. Through this archive, companies that want to do business with the state can also see how similar contracts have actually been renegotiated after award and decide accordingly, instead of tendering into a market where specific players manage to subtly expand their deals well beyond what they originally won.

Candidate countries get a seat at the table

The Act extends the same ‘covered economic operator’ status that determines who gets EU procurement rights to candidate countries that have concluded the relevant agreement with the Union – meaning operators, goods, services, and works from those countries would be treated as covered, on the same footing as GPA parties or free-trade-agreement partners, rather than facing the exclusion the Act applies elsewhere to non-covered third countries. As of today, that’s a list of nine: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine. Kosovo isn’t on that list; it remains the only ‘potential candidate’, one formal rung below candidate status. A footnote buried in the proposal’s financial-impact annex extends the same general framing to ‘candidate countries and, where applicable, potential candidates from the Western Balkans’. Recital 32 frames the broader move explicitly as a tool of enlargement policy, stating that the approach reflects ‘the perspective of enlargement and the gradual integration of candidate countries into the Union’s internal market’, intended to support closer economic integration, encourage regulatory alignment, and strengthen the application of EU rules and standards in its immediate neighbourhood.

Here, the infrastructure angle gets genuinely interesting, because procurement access for candidate countries wins points for the EU in the race to finance and build infrastructure in the Western Balkans. Estimates of China’s regional footprint vary by source and methodology, but they consistently run into the tens of billions. Montenegro’s Bar-Boljare highway remains the sharpest single case study: an €800-million-plus loan from China’s Exim Bank financed 85% of the project’s first phase, and by the time repayments came due, Montenegro’s public debt had climbed above 100% of GDP; this is precisely the kind of dependency and fiscal exposure this Act’s security-of-supply provisions are explicitly designed to guard against. Serbia’s ties run in a similar direction, with Chinese financing and construction embedded across rail links, mining, and industrial assets – over €10 billion in investment and a comparable amount in loans and grants since 2009 – layered on top of a long-standing reliance on Russian gas that has repeatedly complicated Belgrade’s balancing act between Brussels and Moscow. It is worth keeping a sense of proportion with regard to the EU’s own position, too: across the region as a whole, the EU remains by far the larger economic partner, accounting for 70% or more of trade and foreign investment even in Serbia, the country most exposed to Chinese capital. But dominance in aggregate hasn’t stopped China from becoming the financier of choice for precisely those high-visibility, politically salient infrastructure projects that shape how a government’s population experiences EU versus non-EU partnership day to day. Extending genuine EU procurement rights to candidate-country firms and, eventually, opening EU-financed infrastructure tenders to their participation, is one of the more concrete tools available for shifting that calculus.

This is yet another preview of EU membership itself – a tangible, working demonstration, years before accession is likely to conclude, of the kind of access that’s supposed to make joining worth the long and often frustrating road to get there.

It’s worth being precise about what ‘winning points’ actually means, because this framework pulls in two different directions. One direction is about dependency at home: whether a Balkan government’s next highway or power plant gets built by a Chinese state-owned contractor on an opaque Exim Bank loan, or through an EU-governed procurement process instead. Covered status doesn’t decide that outcome on its own – Belgrade and Podgorica still choose their own financiers – but it does make it easier and more attractive for local firms to bid into the EU’s own financed pipeline rather than defaulting to whichever financier shows up first with cash and no due-diligence strings attached – which has historically been China more often than the EU. The other direction is about market access outwards: covered status gives a Bosnian or Albanian construction firm the same formal right to bid on infrastructure tenders inside the EU-27 that a French or German firm already has, opening a far larger addressable market to companies that have been confined to small domestic economies. This is yet another preview of EU membership itself – a tangible, working demonstration, years before accession is likely to conclude, of the kind of access that’s supposed to make joining worth the long and often frustrating road to get there.

 

Chaque mardi, Pascal Boniface reçoit un membre de l’équipe de recherche de l’‪‪IRIS pour décrypter un fait d’actualité internationale. Aujourd’hui, échange avec Christophe Ventura, directeur de recherche à l’IRIS, autour des résultats du premier tour de l’élection présidentielle au Brésil qui placent Flávio Bolsonaro, fils de l’ancien président Jair Bolsonaro, en tête avec 47,03 % des voix devant le président sortant Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva qui obtient 45,16 % des suffrages. Les deux candidats se retrouveront au second tour, le 25 octobre. Le Brésil va-t-il à son tour s’inscrire dans le virage conservateur observé dans plusieurs pays d’Amérique du Sud ?

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On Tuesday, October 6, NATO's large-scale command-and-staff exercise Steadfast Duel 26 began. The exercise focuses on testing the functioning of NATO command structures and chains of command, as well as practising the implementation of defence plans.

The Swedish Armed Forces is deploying the Patriot air defence system to Poland to strengthen the protection of NATO's eastern flank. The Swedish forces will protect the logistics hub in south-eastern Poland that plays a key role in providing military and civilian support to Ukraine.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares, met his Finnish counterpart, Elina Valtonen, in Helsinki on Tuesday, with whom he discussed the strong bilateral relations and the prospect of new areas of collaboration.

From December, Sweden intends to provide an air defence unit for the protection of NATO's logistics hub in Poland used for military and civilian support to Ukraine.

On October 5, Armenia-Lithuania bilateral defence consultations took place at the administrative complex of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Armenia.