October 2, 2006
McCreevy to sound last post
A politician keen to maintain popular support and enjoy a quiet life is not generally advised to pick a fight with postmen.
For a start, there are quite a lot of them - about 5m people are employed by postal groups in the European Union. They are also highly organised, with the French postal workers� union boasting particularly strong political influence.
Postmen are also popular, in an old-fashioned, gentle kind of way. Everyone, after all, loves to get a letter, and some of that feeling surely rubs off on the long-suffering men and women who cycle around town in the early-morning drizzle to deliver you a precious piece of mail.
Yet Charlie McCreevy is undaunted. Later this month, the EU internal market commissioner is expected to table a proposal that will introduce full and unlimited competition into the Union’s market for postal services. As the FT reported last week, the proposal will dismantle the last "reserved area" in which the big national postal groups retain a monopoly - the market for delivering mail weighing less than 50 grammes.
This large and highly profitable sector is still dominated by the likes of La Poste in France and Deutsche Post in Germany, but if the Commission has its way their monopoly will finally end in 2009.
The plans are certain to create huge antagonism, and some Commission officials are already worried about a replay of the controversy they stirred up with the EU services directive. Amid howls of protests from the unions and governments in France and Germany, Brussels was eventually forced to accept a radically watered-down version of its original plans. Many doubt that the once-ambitious proposal will make much difference in practice.
The good news is that there are at least two reasons to be more optimistic for the Commission’s postal plans. For a start, Brussels is only taking on one group of people rather than the hundreds of different workers and professions it tackled with the services directive. Though it is a very powerful group indeed, at least Mr McCreevy will not have to worry about a grand coalition of opponents ranging from Austrian builders to French cameramen.
The other factor counting in the Commission’s favour is that it can rely on the support of Germany this time round. While Europe’s largest economy was one of the biggest opponents of the original services directive, Berlin is keen to see a speedy opening of the market for postal services across Europe. The government, after all, remains the biggest shareholder in Deutsche Post - which over recent years has reinvented itself as a big, acquisitive and (largely) successful global logistics and mail group.
The Bonn-based Post believes it will profit from an open, liberalised market in the EU, but wants to ensure that its rivals do not retain any monopolistic advantage. That is why it has called on the Commission to fix the 2009 date for all European markets, including France, Italy and other opponents of further liberalisation.
Whether all this will be enough to see through the Commission plans is, of course, unclear. But Brussels is starting from a much more promising position than it did with its ill-fated proposal on the services directive.
Tobias Buck
