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Economy Minister Peter Altmaier will unveil the strategy on Tuesday to grant special support to sectors such as batteries for electric cars, chemicals and 3D printing, two industry sources and one official said. The German newspaper Die Welt reported Thursday that the strategic industries for protection in Altmaier's paper would also include cars, machine engineering, medical devices, green technologies, aerospace and defense.
Altmaier's plan comes hard on the heels of proposals from the BDI, Germany's biggest industrial group, to take a more defensive line against China and allow companies to bulk up into European champions that can take on Asian rivals, even if that means rewriting the EU's hallowed competition rulebook.
The debate over national champions has taken center stage politically because Paris and Berlin are frustrated that the European Commission's antitrust regulators are set to block a landmark merger between France's Alstom and Germany's Siemens in the rail sector.
Brussels argues that a combined Franco-German train behemoth would harm consumers and smaller businesses in the same sector, but the free marketeers at the Commission are looking increasingly isolated. Freed from British economic liberalism in the EU, French and German policymakers are increasingly looking to tear up the EU's competition and merger rules to cosset their biggest businesses.
Only last Thursday, Altmaier told parliamentarians in the Bundestag that the EU should allow the creation of "European champions" that can compete with China and the U.S. "That is why we must ... consider what adjustments are necessary in our competition law," he said. His French counterpart Bruno Le Maire has also called for new EU competition rules to smoothe the creation of champions. [...]