“Many companies are asking for predictability and staying the course rather than changing the rules of the game simply because they cannot cope,” he said in an interview on Monday afternoon.
“One of the main criticisms of business is, stop changing course every half year,” he added. “Particularly heavy industry have very long investment cycles, sometimes decades ahead, and you are then not helped by politicians who are in the habit of constantly changing their minds.”
Hoekstra swerved a question on whether that’s a criticism of his own political family, the center-right European People’s Party.
Revising existing rules “is a temptation we should resist more generally,” he said. “As a general rule, politicians are much more prone to buyer’s remorse than businesspeople.”
But the loudest calls for changing to the EU’s climate legislation over the past year have come from the EPP. Its leader Manfred Weber has campaigned to scrap the bloc’s phaseout of combustion engine cars, calling the law passed last year a “mistake.” Last month, the group sought to weaken the bloc’s anti-deforestation law.
The EPP, unlike Hoekstra, has also been reluctant to give its full-throated support to the EU’s next climate milestone. Earlier this year, the Commission recommended the bloc cut planet-warming emissions by 90 percent by 2040 in order to reach net zero by 2050, but has yet to make a formal legislative proposal.
