That’s all, folks! Breton’s exit wraps 5 years of EU policy drama

BRUSSELS — Were you not entertained? 
European Union executive chief Ursula von der Leyen this week pushed France to pull its commissioner pick Thierry Breton and to present instead the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Séjourné as its nominee for the new European Commission team.
The move on Tuesday capped five years of political drama inside the European Commission’s Brussels Berlaymont headquarters. Thierry Breton arrived as a “plan B” commissioner in 2019 but quickly climbed the ranks of real power. He provoked tech moguls with his social media posts, and trolled colleagues and counterparts with off-the-cuff remarks and speeches.
The French former business executive jumped from one topic to another, using his purview as internal market commissioner to slam Big Tech and to take charge of new areas like the EU’s Covid-19 vaccine production plan and its defense ramp-up to support Ukraine militarily.
At the end of it all, Breton went out with a sharp attack against his boss, just a day before von der Leyen presented her new team — a testament to his need to own every news cycle.
On learning of his departure, some members of the European Parliament paid tribute to Breton’s talent for illuminating obscure and poorly understood aspects of EU policymaking. French socialist MEP Raphaël Glucksmann thanked Breton for his contribution to weapons production, while Greens group member Damian Boeselager lauded his attention to obscure topics such as industrial data.  
Others, however, lamented Breton’s style. Prominent Brussels tech lobbyist Connor Allen, who currently works for Mitsubishi Electric, rued Breton’s having turned EU policy into a “personal soap opera.” 
As the Frenchman emptied out his desk drawers, one question stuck out: What kind of stamp did Thierry Breton leave on EU policy?
Here’s our take, in five parts:
One of Breton’s big crusades in Brussels was to pressure online platforms to clean up their acts and crack down on illegal and harmful content and disinformation.
He turned the underpinning law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), into a household name and — his critics say — into a political tool.
His fight for tougher online content moderation turned ugly when he got into shouting matches with tech billionaire and X owner Elon Musk, who showed contempt for the EU rulebook and positioned himself as a free speech defender against an interventionist Breton. 
But a letter Breton sent to Musk was a low point, coming as it did just ahead of an interview between Musk and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Breton’s critics deemed his intervention as interference in the U.S. election race.
The affair was seen as one of many instances of political gunslinging by Breton that irked his own Commission services, who feared such public spats could come back to haunt Big Tech enforcement cases at later stages.
Breton embodied the shift in Brussels on defense policy, touring Europe’s ammunition factories to map out the bloc’s production capacity.
Before the summer, however, a report accused Breton of “vastly overstating” the bloc’s ammunition manufacturing. 
During his tenure the Frenchman spearheaded two pieces of legislation to allow EU cash to go to defense companies — the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP), to boost manufacturing, and the European Defence Industry Reinforcement through common Procurement Act (EDIRPA), to incentivize joint purchases. ASAP money has already been allocated; EDIRPA results are expected in October. 
The now-former internal market commissioner leaves behind the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), a €1.5 billion cash pot for defense contractors that also opens the door to a greater role for the European Commission on weapons purchases. The regulation is still in talks in the Council and in the European Parliament, and will now proceed without him. 
When Covid-19 disrupted global microchips supply chains, Breton moved quickly and became the face of the 2022 European Chips Act, one of the biggest pieces of industrial policy in the previous mandate.
The EU set a goal of claiming a larger share of the global chips value chain, taking on the U.S. and China.
That plan is now in dire straits, however. On Monday, U.S.-based chips manufacturer Intel announced it was pausing two projects, in Germany and Poland, for two years — dealing a heavy blow to the EU’s chipmaking goal.
Before the summer, Breton’s services admitted in a report that the headline target — 20 percent of the global chips value chain by 2030 — would never be met. 
It’s evidently easier to declare an industrial policy than to deliver on it.
Despite Breton’s unexpected exit, his grand plan to rival Musk’s Starlink with an EU alternative satellite network that can beam internet services down to earth is nearly a reality.
The IRIS² constellation is set to use €2.4 billion in EU cash to get going, thanks largely to Breton’s efforts. The program became his pet project in the last mandate, to the consternation of Germany, and Breton found bits of funding from various EU cash pots to get it all going.
While the satellite program is fixed in law, Breton has been under fire for missed promises and a sloppy timeline. He had promised industry he’d have a contract signed with a consortium of industry leaders by Easter, but even as he filed his resignation letter on Monday that deal was still weeks away at best. With the financing locked in place, someone else will soon be taking credit for IRIS². 
In only his second month on the job, Breton presented Europe’s grand Huawei plan, the 5G Security Toolbox. It was a watershed moment in Europe’s posturing toward China on tech sovereignty and tech diplomacy.
The French commissioner continued to push the line on 5G security throughout the mandate, pressuring EU countries to ditch equipment from such “high-risk vendors” in their networks to avoid cyberespionage, sabotage and strategic dependency.
Mari Eccles contributed reporting.