Central Europe cheers EU court truck ruling

Central and Eastern European countries declared victory after Friday’s Court of Justice ruling scrapping a truck-return provision they complained excluded them from the EU’s internal market.
But the court delivered only a partial win as it upheld the rest of the contentious Mobility Package — and reopened the door to more political spats over the law.
The court ruled that Council and Parliament negotiators hadn’t done their homework when they decided that shipping companies should return trucks to their home base every eight weeks, and binned the requirement.
The measure was added to prevent companies from setting up shop in low-cost countries, despite largely operating elsewhere on the Continent. But countries on the periphery of the bloc — some with major trucking industries — blasted it as discriminatory.
But while its deletion is a resounding victory for the countries that fought tooth and nail to remove the obligation, the court’s broader ruling may not end the feud.
The truck return mandate was the most controversial part of the Mobility Package, but the legislation also set new rules on drivers’ rest times, their right to local pay levels, and their right to carry out pickups and deliveries within other EU countries.
Negotiations on the reforms underscored deep divisions at the heart of the internal market.
Richer countries demanded the measures to prevent cheaper workers from eroding the social rights of local truckers, arguing it could also undermine support for the EU and its internal market.
Central and Eastern European countries, in contrast, said the package called into question their right to freely compete in the internal market.
Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland filed 15 overlapping complaints, some with the support of Estonia and Latvia.
Other countries, including Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, stepped in to defend the laws.
It made for an exceptionally fierce legal and political battle.
The EU had dropped the principle of equality of member countries, and instead “divided those states into a center and a periphery,” Bulgaria’s lawyer complained during a hearing last year.
On Friday, challengers of the package celebrated the court ruling as a major win.
Malta’s Deputy Prime Minister Ian Borg cheered the “annulment of the controversial, market-distorting” measure, while Lithuania’s transport ministry said the judgment “marks an important victory in ensuring the freedoms of the EU internal market.”
In dismissing the measure, the court recognized that it was “incompatible with the principles of the European Union’s internal market,” the ministry argued.
Except, the CJEU’s ruling took a different approach.
The court decided that the truck return mandate had to be canceled because negotiators didn’t have “sufficient information at their disposal when that measure was adopted to enable its proportionality.”
But it dismissed other challenges, rejecting arguments that the Mobility Package undermined the EU-guaranteed freedom of movement or discriminated against companies on the bloc’s periphery.
The judges even added that if the reforms did hit some companies more than others, that’s only “because they opted for an economic operating model consisting of providing most, if not all, of their services to recipients established in Member States distant from their Member State of establishment.”
That means the ruling could lead to more battles.
Transport worker group ETF saw an opportunity: If the court found that there hadn’t been enough information to back up the truck return requirement, it’s now up to the Commission to “address these insufficiencies and reinstate this measure,” it said.
German industry group BGL sent a press release with the same demand.
But it’s unclear whether there’ll be any appetite for that in the new Commission.
“Will the European Commission try to build a case with more information around the proportionality of that measure? Or does this judgement put an end to the EU attempt of requesting operators to bring trucks home in addition to the necessary visits for mandatory technical inspections?” asked Raluca Marian, the EU advocacy director of road transport industry group IRU.
“It is not clear what will happen next,” she said.