Chasing Too Many Rabbits: The Overloaded Agenda of EU Competition Policy Under Teresa Ribera

There is an old saying belonging to the wise Confucius — familiar to lawyers and hunters alike — that he who chases two rabbits catches neither. It is a warning against the dilution of focus that comes with the multiplication of objectives. The current EU competition commissioner, Teresa Ribera, appears determined to test this maxim to its limits.

A Commissioner Without “Competition” in Her Title

A telling starting point: Ribera’s formal title is Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition. The word “competition” does not appear. This is not a mere administrative quirk. It signals, by design, that competition enforcement is to be embedded within — and subordinated to — a broader political programme. Before a single merger has been assessed or a single investigation opened, the institutional architecture already tells us something important: competition policy is expected to serve a master with many faces.

Her Mission Letter, issued by Commission President von der Leyen in September 2024, is explicit: Ribera is charged with modernising EU competition policy to ensure it “supports European companies to innovate, compete and lead world-wide and contributes to our wider objectives on competitiveness and sustainability, social fairness and security.” The new approach, the Letter adds, “should also reflect the growing importance of resilience in the face of geopolitical and other threats to supply chains.”

Let us count the objectives enumerated in that single paragraph: competitiveness, innovation, sustainability, social fairness, security, and resilience. Six objectives. One instrument.

The Catalogue of Goals: A Policy or a Wish List?

In her inaugural speech at the CRA Brussels Conference in December 2024, Ribera described competition policy as “a compass to reach the kind of Europe we want to live in” — competitive, green, fair, and resilient. In the same breath, she spoke of “a helping hand for public goals, such as facilitating a speedy and fair green economy.” On LinkedIn, her office recently promoted a Blueprint Conference structured around four pillars: sustainability and resilience; consumers and social fairness; equal conditions for businesses; and a refreshed competition policy.

Each of these objectives is, in isolation, entirely legitimate. No one disputes the importance of decarbonisation, social equity, or strategic resilience. The problem is not the objectives themselves but their simultaneous enlistment under the banner of competition law — a body of rules historically designed around a narrower, more tractable goal: protecting the competitive process for the benefit of consumers.

The ongoing consultation on the revision of the EU Merger Guidelines — a cornerstone initiative of Ribera’s tenure — reflects the same expansive logic. The Commission is inviting input on competitiveness and resilience, market power, innovation, decarbonisation, digitalisation, efficiencies, public policy, defence and security, and labour market considerations. Not an analytical framework — a manifesto.

The Missing Rabbits: Consumer Welfare and EU Competitiveness

What is striking in this catalogue of virtuous goals is the conspicuous marginalisation of two concepts that once anchored EU competition analysis: consumer welfare and, paradoxically, competitiveness itself — not as a slogan, but as a measurable economic outcome.

Consumer welfare — the standard that asks whether a given market structure or behaviour raises prices, reduces output, or diminishes quality for end users — is not absent from Ribera’s discourse, but it has been demoted to one consideration among many. When a competition authority must simultaneously weigh sustainability, resilience, social fairness, and security alongside price effects, consumer welfare loses its disciplining function. It becomes a factor to be balanced, rather than a standard to be upheld.

As for competitiveness in the economic sense — the capacity of EU firms and markets to generate productivity growth and deliver value — it risks being confused with industrial policy. Ribera’s programme draws explicitly on the Draghi Report, which called for greater scale and consolidation. But consolidation for its own sake, absent rigorous competitive analysis, is not a competition policy. It is an industrial policy wearing competition law’s clothes.

The Legal and Institutional Risk of Objective Inflation

From a legal standpoint, the multiplication of objectives carries serious risks that transcend policy preference. Competition law — both the primary Treaty provisions and the secondary legislative instruments — confers enforcement powers predicated on specific, defined legal standards. When an authority invoking those powers pursues objectives not anchored in the applicable legal bases, it risks acting ultra vires. The Court of Justice has consistently required that competition decisions be grounded in competitive harm, not in the broader public interest as such.

There is also an institutional coherence problem. The Commission has other tools — State aid, regulation, trade instruments, industrial policy funds — precisely because the Treaty reflects a considered allocation of competences. When competition enforcement is asked to do the work of industrial policy, environmental regulation, and social policy simultaneously, the result is not a more effective competition policy. It is a less legible one, in which businesses cannot predict the criteria by which their conduct or transactions will be assessed.

Unpredictability is not a neutral inconvenience. It is a competitive harm in its own right. Companies that cannot forecast regulatory outcomes will invest less, innovate less cautiously, and structure transactions with one eye permanently fixed on an ever-shifting political horizon rather than on economic fundamentals.

A Compass with Too Many Needles

Teresa Ribera has described competition policy as Europe’s “compass.” A compass, however, is only useful because it points in one direction. A compass with six needles — each pointing toward a different pole — is not a more sophisticated instrument. It is an unusable one.

The ambitions articulated in Ribera’s mandate are not inherently wrong. Europe does need resilience. The green transition is real. Social fairness matters. But the instrument chosen to deliver these outcomes must be fit for purpose. Competition law is not a general-purpose regulatory lever. It is a finely calibrated set of tools designed to protect market structures that, over time, serve consumers and economic welfare. When it is asked to serve too many masters, it serves none of them well — and, critically, it ceases to serve its primary constituency: the consumer.

The European competition community — practitioners, academics, and national competition authorities alike — would do well to engage seriously with this trajectory before it hardens into doctrine. Once flexibility becomes orthodoxy, correcting course becomes exponentially more difficult.

Some rabbits are worth catching. But catching all of them at once is a guarantee of catching none.