In November, on first mentioning the omnibus package, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, said: “It’s our task to reduce this bureaucratic burden without changing the correct content of the law that we all want.” This is not the interpretation that NGOs, trade unions and defenders of the CSRD and CSDDD have of the text presented yesterday. “These proposals are crude and badly thought-out, risking actually creating bureaucracy and uncertainty,” Lara Wolters, rapporteur to Parliament on the directive adopted in 2024, wrote in reaction on LinkedIn. “MEPs must now succeed where the Commission has failed – finding a compromise for common-sense simplification, without lowering standards.” But the balance of power in the European Parliament has changed since the elections in June: the social democrats, centrists, ecologists and left-wing MEPs, who are in favour of regulation, have lost ground. “The first thought when reading the text is that the Commission wanted to achieve a certain balance.
