Germany's powerful carmakers got what they wanted from yesterday's diesel summit. But everything may change after the election.
At the press conference following yesterday's crisis summit in Berlin to deal with the unfolding Dieselgate scandal, you would have been forgiven for losing track of who was who.
With only five lecterns and around 20 participants, they had to play a round-robin of auto executives, each taking the stand to say how very, very sorry he was over revelations of cheating and collusion that have come out. Each middle-aged white German man was more indistinguishable than the next.
But all the while there was one woman standing to their left, looking very out of place. It was the summit's co-host, the center-left German environment minister Barbara Hendricks. And as the German auto chiefs detailed the agreement reached inside, an agreement in which she had been politically defeated, you would see on her face that she was already plotting her revenge.
On this week's Brussels2Berlin podcast, Tyson Barker and Dave Keating talk about the two issues engulfing Berlin at the moment. Both may be a bit overblown.
Whether or not it was illegal, revelations about German automakers cheating the system are denting ‘brand Deutschland’. Do Germans play by a different set of rules?
The allegations that have surfaced this month against German automakers seem to confirm the worst suspicions that many in Europe hold about the EU’s largest country: while they insist on rigid enforcement of rules for everyone else, Germans seem to think the rules don’t apply to them.
A report by Der Spiegel magazine last week alleged that Germany’s five biggest automakers - Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Porsche and Audi - have been colluding for two decades on pricing, suppliers and diesel technical standards, in order to give them leverage over foreign competitors. This week the European Union said it is investigating the issue, and has appointed a vice president to oversee the investigation.
