The enforcer

IF IT’S a Wednesday, it must be Vestager day. Or so it has seemed this month in Brussels, as Margrethe Vestager, the European competition commissioner, has made ambitious moves against formidable adversaries for three weeks in a row. On April 15th it was Google, which Ms Vestager thinks unfairly privileges its shopping service over rivals. A week later she trained her sights on Gazprom, Russia’s mostly state-owned gas giant, accusing it of unfair pricing and market meddling. And on April 29th Ms Vestager announced a probe into the subsidies European governments provide to electric utilities, some of which she thinks may amount to illegal state aid. Amid constant reminders of the EU’s weakness, from Mediterranean migration to the endless Greek saga, Ms Vestager’s shows of strength are a reminder that Brussels has bite.

Ms Vestager, who previously served as Denmark’s economy minister, is clearly a tough cookie. But her impact has as much to do with European law as with her personality. Unburdened by the constraints that shackle most of her 27 fellow commissioners, she can block mergers, launch surprise raids on private offices and threaten multinationals with vast fines. The perception of Ms Vestager’s power is reflected in the parody Twitter accounts set up in the names of different commissioners. Her colleagues are lampooned as propeller-headed nincompoops or scheming mini-Rasputins. Ms Vestager, by contrast, is portrayed as a medieval warrior queen sporting two giant battleaxes.

For some, the power vested in the competition job is a model of how Europe could work if it took rules seriously. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, once suggested endowing the economics commissioner, who oversees the euro zone’s fiscal rules, with powers comparable to those of Ms Vestager. Others, though, worry about political appointees wielding regulatory authority. Those fears are exacerbated by the tendency of Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission president, to describe his administration as the most “political” in history. Shouldn’t competition matters be insulated from politics?

Such concerns have inspired calls for an independent agency to enforce competition law. Ms Vestager will have none of that. She acknowledges that her job is political, but in a noble sense: the single market is an aspect of the EU that enjoys support even from Eurosceptics, and competition has always been at its heart. In speeches she links her work to the commission’s pledges to jump-start Europe’s economy. The Gazprom and utility cases fit nicely with one of the commission’s political priorities: building a functioning and transparent European “energy union”.

Ms Vestager bats away charges that her office may unfairly tilt towards one country or another. On taking office, she says, she asked her staff to dig through the archives to spot any such signs (they came up empty-handed). Some suggest that she launched the cases against America’s Google and Russia’s Gazprom, both begun by her predecessor, within a week of each other to fend off any allegations of national favouritism. She notes simply that the sequencing shows that competition law pays no heed to a company’s ownership. In effect, she has deployed a politician’s sense of timing to deflect allegations of political bias.

Charming, thoughtful and armed with a functioning sense of humour, Ms Vestager cuts an unusual figure in Brussels. Even Gazprom’s officials have been impressed by her matter-of-fact approach. Americans alarmed by her membership of a Danish party called the “Radicals” were relieved to learn that she is actually a middle-of-the-road liberal (and delighted to discover that she was the inspiration for “Borgen”, a trendy Danish political drama). And although fears are growing in Washington that Europe is bent on erecting protectionist barriers against Silicon Valley, American officials are careful to point out that they do not see the Google antitrust probe in this light.

But Ms Vestager’s biggest battles lie ahead. Unlike her predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, she is said to have a distaste for backroom deals, preferring to see cases taken to court if necessary. In cases of wrongdoing she has promised to impose fines big enough to be more than “another line in the spreadsheet”. She does not shy away from quarrels: in February, when the commission had a blazing row over France’s fiscal rule-breaking, Ms Vestager was one of the fiercest advocates of sanctions.

She lost that argument. But she has been more successful at squashing an idea floated by the staff of Günther Oettinger, the digital commissioner, for the regulation of dozens of so-called online “platforms”. New rules, it was suggested, might be a snappier way of bringing tech firms to heel than the heavy weaponry of antitrust law. But Ms Vestager is clear. “If you can use existing legislation instead of creating new stuff, you should,” she says.

Taxing times

A different test comes with another set of cases inherited by Ms Vestager. Four multinationals—Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and Fiat—face allegations of beneficial and discriminatory tax treatment by the authorities in Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. These cases, one legal expert says, “test the limits” of state-aid law. They also provide Ms Vestager with the opportunity to upset a lot of people, including her boss: last year newspapers published details of hundreds more tax deals in Luxembourg, struck when Mr Juncker was prime minister. Ms Vestager has pledged to investigate, and says she will wrap up her work by June; her findings could prove awkward.

This points to the downside of the competition commissioner’s independent authority: there is nowhere to hide when things go wrong. Mr Almunia is widely seen as a failure for his thrice-thwarted attempts to settle with Google. Ms Vestager did not choose to take on most of the cases that have made her name. But their outcomes will determine how she is remembered.