- April 09, 2024
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- April 09, 2024
On April 9, 2024, the Aspen Institute Germany and Telefónica Germany hosted a Digital Dish event under the title “Digital Policy in the Wake of the European Elections: Taking stock of German and European digital policy and looking ahead”. The event was held in German. We were delighted to welcome high-ranking experts from European and German digital policy, German business and academia. Speakers including Dr. Sven Egyedy, Chief Digital Officer of the Federal Foreign Office, Dr. Ilja Nothnagel, Member of the Member of the Executive Board of the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK), Tabea Rößner, Member of Parliament for Bündnis90/Die Grünen and Chairwoman of the Committee on Digital Affairs, and Dr. Daniel Voelsen, Head of the Cybersecurity and Digital Policy Research Clusters, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), and Nikolaus von Peter, Policy Officer at the Representation of the European Commission in Germany attended the event.
Spring 2024 is a good time to take a look into the future of digital policy and review the past three to four years. The European Parliament elections will be held in June 2024. A new European Commission will be constituted in the fall of 2024. And one year later, in the fall of 2025, the German parliamentary elections will take place.
Following the publication of the policy framework “Europe’s Digital Decade 2020”, a political framework program aimed at an ambitious, comprehensive digital transformation of Europe by 2030, the EU was surprisingly effective in the first three years with 13 fast-tracked legislative proposals such as the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Cyber Resilience Act and the Chips Act.
The German government, which presented the ambitious “Digital Strategy Germany” in 2022, was somewhat less productive. According to the Bitkom Digital Policy Monitor, the digital policy track record of the governing coalition of the SPD, CDU and Bündnis90/Die Grünen is mixed. Every second digital project is at risk of not being completed. This makes 2024 an crucial year for digital policy in Germany.
A few months before the 2024 European elections, important questions arise for the development of the European and German digital policy program: What can we expect from European digital policy after the EU elections? What can we expect from the future EU Commission? And what will the years 2024 and 2025 bring for German digital policy?
