It’s not the news that Google and Apple want to hear, but EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has no plans to quit Brussels any time soon.

Even though she generated intense hostility from France and Germany — the two most powerful EU countries — with her decision to block a landmark rail merger between Alstom and Siemens, the Danish liberal is not giving up on her ambition of another stint in Brussels.

The nemesis of U.S. Big Tech has repeatedly said that she would like to stay on for a second term as competition commissioner, but many officials in Brussels see her as an ideal candidate to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission president in the fall. A recent poll of 1,769 EU professionals identified her as the runaway star of the Commission.

When asked whether she thinks she’ll survive into the next Commission despite the vitriol from Paris and Berlin, she insisted she has no immediate plans to move out of her pied-à-terre in Brussels.

“I don’t know. I haven’t sent in — how do you say? — ending my lease, of my apartment,” she told POLITICO in an interview.

Vestager argued that having done a “good job” on cases such as the Alstom-Siemens merger would ultimately hold her in good stead for the future. Brushing aside the Franco-German demands that she allow the creation of a European rail champion, Vestager argued that the tie-up would have created a behemoth that would have harmed consumers across Europe.

“In my experience, if you want your next job to be a good job, you need to do a good job in the job you have already,” she insisted. “I am 100 percent with the decisions I have taken.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Vestager pushed back against suggestions from Berlin and Paris that she had made such a big mistake on the so-called Railbus merger that the EU competition rule book would have to be rewritten.

She also discussed a number of tech issues, and said her team is looking into Google’s jobs search service, and added that she had received a brisk response to questionnaires on potential antitrust abuses by Amazon.

French and German fury

While Vestager is confident that she did the right thing on trains, the French and Germans are furious. They say that the tie-up was necessary to combat rival manufacturers in China and claim that the decision was an “economic error” and a “political mistake.”

This backlash is a big headache for Vestager’s prospects in Brussels. It only compounds her more immediate problem: The government in Copenhagen, which will have to nominate her, is led by a political opponent — Lars Løkke Rasmussen. She is also impeded by the fact that she is from a smaller political grouping, and from a non-eurozone country.

Not content with simply slamming Vestager’s judgment, France and Germany are also demanding a wholesale rewrite of EU competition rules.

Vestager conceded that Europe has “to do a number of things … in order to have fair competition,” but insisted that the competition rules are not to blame.

“The present set of rules, they represent a strategic choice,” she said. “I think that the strategic choice of having fair competition, that is the right strategic choice for Europe.”

Criticizing competition rules is too easy, she continued, when Siemens and Alstom could have avoided the prohibition. For “most of the transaction, we had no concerns,” she said, adding that Brussels would have cleared the deal if the rail giants had offered sufficient remedies.

Vestager also suggested that the French and Germans are barking up the wrong tree by attacking competition policy. “It is important that you don’t think that competition policy can solve everything, because it cannot.”

She acknowledged that China presents a problem, but suggested that the remedies lie with trade policy, rather than within the realm of antitrust and state aid.

She said that China is a “state-governed market economy, with very large state-owned companies as the main driver,” and that European companies are now facing companies “with subsidies in their pockets.”

Rather than new competition rules, she stressed that the need for more robust trade defense is “obvious” and took a positive view of new tougher screening rules for Chinese investments in the EU.

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She also pushed for Europe to prioritize “quality” and “working conditions” rather than simply prices in the way that it handles international procurement tenders for big projects.

The concept of reciprocity in big international contracts is a hot political topic where she thinks there is room for more action from divided EU countries. France, for example, has long argued that EU rail markets could be closed to companies from countries restricting access to their markets, but Paris has met resistance from Northern European states.

Vestager agreed that it is now time for a EU to take a more unified and assertive stance on these trade issues as Europe is a prize market. “In my opinion, there is room to be more hard-nosed … and much more self-confident because we have a lot to offer.”

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