Recently, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, wearing a pirate-like bandage over his black eye, spoke at the Munich Motor Show about the penetration of Chinese car manufacturers into the European Union.
– Competition stimulates business. This is in the interest of the consumer. “Competition should spur us on, not deter us,” he said optimistically after viewing the exhibition of Chinese electric train suppliers at IAA Mobility 2023 in Munich.
– In the 1980s they said Japanese cars would flood the market. Twenty years later, there was also talk of cars from South Korea, and now history is repeating itself with Chinese electric cars, Scholz added condescendingly.
And he sat down in a puddle. Because a week later the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, essentially made Scholz look like an idiot.
— The Commission launches an anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles supplied from China. There is an influx of cheap electric vehicles from China into the European market,” she said during the European Parliament plenary session.
According to her, the cheap Chinese electric trains in Europe are due to subsidies from the Chinese authorities to their manufacturers. They say this ‘distorts’ the European market and leads to unfair competition.