Brussels now wants to add another objective — use Europe’s enormous purchasing power to rebuild European industry.
The European Commission unveiled its proposed Public Procurement Act on 9 September, replacing three separate 2014 directives with a single regulation covering public contracts, utilities and concessions. Behind what sounds like an administrative reform lies a much bigger change in European economic policy. Public authorities across the EU spend roughly €2.5 trillion every year, equivalent to around 15–16% of EU GDP. More than 250,000 public authorities purchase everything from trains and hospital equipment to energy infrastructure, software, construction materials and military-related technology.
Quality would have to carry substantially greater weight, while resilience, cybersecurity, supply-chain security, environmental performance and European economic interests could increasingly influence who wins a contract. Reuters reports that quality would generally account for at least 30% of evaluation, rising to 50% in labour-intensive contracts.
“Brussels increasingly views this money not simply as expenditure, but as industrial leverage. Under the proposed system, public tenders would no longer revolve so heavily around the cheapest offer.”
EuroAsia.News, reporting from Brussels
Most politically significant is the introduction of “Made in Europe” preferences.
The proposal does not simply declare that governments must buy European products regardless of cost. The mechanism is more targeted. In strategic areas, contracting authorities could favour bids containing substantial European content and restrict access where foreign countries do not give European companies equivalent access to their own public markets. The Commission has been preparing this shift for months, describing procurement reform explicitly as a tool to strengthen European sovereignty, resilience and economic security.
That represents a remarkable change in philosophy.
Europe spent much of the past three decades championing open markets while China built industrial champions behind powerful state procurement, subsidies and localisation requirements, and the United States increasingly linked public support to domestic production through policies such as “Buy American”. European companies were often expected to compete globally while European taxpayers remained unusually open to financing imported equipment.
Brussels is now beginning to conclude that openness without reciprocity can become industrial self-harm.
The new procurement proposal complements March’s Industrial Accelerator Act, which already introduced European-production and low-carbon preferences for strategic sectors including steel, cement, aluminium, cars, batteries, solar equipment, wind technology and other net-zero industries. The Commission says these measures are intended to create reliable demand for European manufacturing and make investment in new European factories commercially viable.
The potential scale is enormous. Even if only part of the EU’s €2.5 trillion procurement market is redirected toward European suppliers, the effect could dwarf many conventional subsidy programmes. The Commission estimates that procurement covered directly by EU rules averages around €616 billion annually — roughly three times the annual EU budget.
Imagine municipalities purchasing European electric buses instead of imported alternatives, hospitals favouring European medical technology, state-owned utilities buying European transformers, or railway projects awarding additional value to locally produced steel and signalling systems. Public procurement suddenly becomes something close to an industrial-policy machine.
There are obvious risks.
European preference rules could increase costs for taxpayers if cheaper foreign suppliers are excluded. Governments could protect inefficient domestic producers. Determining what genuinely counts as “European” will also be complicated in modern supply chains where a product may be designed in Germany, assembled in Hungary and contain electronics from Asia.
Trade partners may retaliate as well. Brussels therefore stresses that the system must remain compatible with EU trade agreements and the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement. Countries offering reciprocal procurement access would not automatically be treated like closed foreign markets.
The proposal must still pass the European Parliament and EU member states, meaning its details can change considerably before becoming law.
But the political direction is difficult to miss.
Europe is moving away from the assumption that government should simply purchase the cheapest acceptable product available anywhere in the world. Price is increasingly being joined by origin, resilience, industrial capacity and strategic independence.
The EU has spent years discussing how to stop deindustrialisation.
With €2.5 trillion of annual purchasing power potentially behind it, “Buy European” may finally give Brussels something more powerful than another strategy paper: a customer.
