Macron chides Brussels for hiring American economist

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Emmanuel Macron has criticised the EU’s top antitrust watchdog for an “extremely worrying” decision to hire an American chief economist, saying it would be better to find a “great European” to police Big Tech.

The French president on Tuesday escalated a dispute over the European Commission appointing Fiona Scott Morton, a former Obama administration official and a Yale University professor, claiming it highlighted the EU’s lack of ambition.

“Are there no great European researchers with the academic skills needed to do this job? If that’s our conclusion, it’s an extremely worrying one,” Macron told reporters at a summit in Brussels on Tuesday. “It means we have a big problem with all of the academic systems in Europe.” He also said he believed that China or the US would never have appointed a European to such a position of influence.

The clash over Scott Morton has highlighted deeper fissures within the EU, with France leading calls for a tougher approach that protects Europe’s economic independence against the power of the US, Big Tech and China.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, defended the appointment on Tuesday in the European parliament, praising Scott Morton’s expertise and dismissing concerns over potential conflicts of interest and the economist’s nationality.

“I find it questionable to assume that someone’s nationality will automatically lead to a bias in favour of companies originating from that same nationality,” she said.

Vestager argued applications were rightly opened up to an American because the pool of eligible candidates was small, and stressed the decision to make the offer to Scott Morton was a collective one by the commission’s top officials. 

Macron’s government has argued that Scott Morton’s past consulting work for will leave her sidelined from Brussels work on important Big Tech cases, just at a time when the EU is seeking to enforce its landmark digital rules and step up antitrust scrutiny of Apple, Amazon and Google.

But Vestager said Scott Morton, who as chief economist would contribute to competition investigations and broader policy work, would only have to recuse from a very limited number of cases. She said the idea that having worked for big tech would make her job “irrelevant” was “simply not true”.

Her appointment led to a string of co-ordinated tweets on Thursday led by senior French officials. French foreign minister Catherine Colonna expressed “astonishment” at the choice. Several big European parliament political groups said the appointment would risk “foreign interference” in EU decisions.

There has also been support for Scott Morton’s appointment to one of the world’s most influential antitrust enforcement positions.

On Sunday, Philippe Lamberts, co-president of the Greens, withdrew his criticism, tweeting: “Having talked with Fiona Scott-Morton today, my concerns have been addressed. Her expertise in competition policy will help us fight excessive market power.”

A group of economists from institutions such as the London School of Economics and the European University Institute, also wrote a letter backing Scott Morton as “one of the best economists in the world in the domain of industrial organisation”.

Johannes Hahn, the commissioner in charge of human resources matters, said the contentious decision to open the position to non-EU applicants was to allow a choice “from a global pool of the best possible-suited candidates,” he told reporters on Tuesday.