How to fix Europe’s struggling telecom companies has become one of Europe’s most vexing policy tussles. Many struggle to make money and invest in upgrading the continent’s digital infrastructure. They blame market fragmentation and rigid competition laws. The European Union counts 34 mobile operators, compared to just four in China and three in the United States. As the new European Commission Executive Vice President for ‘Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition’, Spain’s Teresa Ribera faces this – and other hefty challenges.
She will have to decide whether to soften antitrust rules to allow creation of European champions while enforcing a crackdown on Big Tech. In addition to her new job policing tech competition, she is tasked with completing Europe’s Green Deal, an area she knows fairly well as Spain’s Ecological Transition Minister and as an international climate negotiator.
Born in 1969, Ribera grew up as the eldest of five children in a family of academics in a comfortable Madrid neighborhood. Her mother was a philosophy professor and expert in Krausism, named after the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, who advocates tolerance and academic freedom from dogma. Her father, a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine, was a promoter of modern geriatrics in Spain.
A lover of hiking and reading, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Constitutional Law and Political Science from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She became an associate professor at the Department of Public Law and Philosophy of Law at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Mother of three daughters, she lives in the Spanish capital with her husband Mariano Bacigalupo, an Argentine lawyer and Board Member of the Spanish National Securities Market Commission.
Ribera’s political rise began in 2005 when she became Director of Spain’s Climate Change Office, following different positions in the Ministries of Public Work, Transportation, and Environment. In 2008, she was appointed Secretary of State for climate change.
“She is a person of dialogue, who listens and knows how to be open to certain proposals,” praised the director of Greenpeace Spain, Eva Saldana. This year, Ribera was awarded the Progressive Person of the Year by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. She participated in the 2015 Paris Agreement while directing the Paris-based think tank, the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. Ribera has also been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on Climate and of Sustainable Development Solution Networks’ Global Leadership Council.
“She’s really knowledgeable about all the questions surrounding sustainable development,” says Nicolas Berghmans, Director of IDDRI’s New Industrial Policies Program. “I was always impressed by her ability to read the political landscape and find alliances.”
As Spain’s Ecological Transition Minister for the past six years, Ribera oversaw the shutdown of Spain’s coal industry, negotiated a nuclear phase-out, and secured an exemption from EU electricity market rules for Spain and Portugal during the 2022 gas crisis. Spain pioneered setting a legal target to reach climate neutrality by 2050 –a goal the European Union later adopted for the entire bloc. In Brussels, she will be tasked with overcoming a backlash from farmers, consumers, and businesses fearful of high prices, and the impact on competitiveness.
The role will require ideological flexibility. She already has been forced to make a U-turn on nuclear energy. The socialist Ribera once described the European Union’s decision to label it a sustainable investment as “a huge mistake.” Nuclear-friendly countries led by France raised alarms. She now assures that she will not oppose nuclear power expansion in Europe.
Ribera declined an interview request for this article.
Ribera also will oversee EU antitrust enforcement. That’s a powerful position and her nomination generated strong opposition from the European People’s Party, which was reluctant to see a choice they described as “too radical, too green.” The Spaniard replaces Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager, who ordered Apple to repay $13 billion in underreported taxes and earned Donald Trump’s epithet as a US-hating “tax lady.”
Vestager has warned that a sweeping overhaul of competition policy and merger rules to create European industrial champions could open a “Pandora’s box.” Ribera has acknowledged Vestager’s contributions but suggested that change may be necessary, stating, “Margarethe has done a great job, and we need to see to what extent this great job needs to evolve.”
Ribera could renew the push for additional “fair share” payments from US tech companies who account for much of the telco’s traffic. And she could allow the telephone companies to consolidate, despite the risk of higher prices. Many expect her to please her home country’s national champion Telefonica. Spain doesn’t have a digital policy, the charge goes, it has a Telefonica policy. And Telefonica’s interests are clear: as one of Europe’s three largest telecom companies, it will lead any consolidation.
“We need the size to compete in international markets, but we also need the internal market to work, with a business ecosystem where things are reasonably balanced,” Ribera told the Spanish newspaper El País. She is expected to allow European companies to scale up and compete globally against US and Chinese giants.
The status quo is no longer an option. European competitiveness is fading and the EU needs to take bold corrective steps. It remains to be seen if a pragmatist, consensus-builder Spanish socialist will be up to the tall task.
Natalia Hidalgo Martinez is a Spanish-based freelance writer covering transatlantic relations between the US and Europe.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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