DSA: the impossible deadline pushed by En Marche

Pressed to deliver results, representatives of the En Marche galaxy in Brussels are pushing for a trilogue agreement on the Digital Services Act before the French presidential election. To do so, the Council and Parliament would have to to drop negotiating points they consider essential, which they do not seem ready to do at the moment. We already knew that the French government wanted a trialogue agreement on the Digital Services Act by the end of the French EU presidency, on June 30, 2022. Commissionner Thierry Breton, who is part of the En Marche galaxy in Brussels, has been supporting this timetable for several months. To achieve this, the European Parliament has worked at breakneck speed, and adopted its amendments on the text mid-January, at the risk of not seriously debating certain fundamental issues. Now the Parliament and Council have to discuss a final version of the text. Presumably, they had until June to do so. But according to our information, the real agenda pushed by the French government, master of the clocks during its presidency of the Council, is even tighter: French junior minister for digital Cedric O now wants an agreement between European institutions by mid-March, around the beginning of Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign. Mid-March « The technical and political meetings planned for this trialogue are spread out until mid-March, and none are planned after that, » a parliamentary source told us, talking about the DSA’s adoption process,…