Over a three-hour hearing in the European Parliament on Tuesday evening, Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, the EU's likely next competition chief, offered few clues about how she plans to approach her mandate over the next five years.

If confirmed as expected, the Spanish candidate will have a history-making portfolio that will see her combining both the role of chief antitrust enforcer and climate czar, as she will also be responsible for overseeing the 27-member bloc’s green energy transition.

But her appointment is being watched closely because although she is a lawyer by training, Ribera Rodríguez has no previous background in antitrust. She has held a succession of senior climate-related posts in the Spanish government.

Marc Wiggers, an Amsterdam-based partner at Loyens & Loeff, said her lack of prior competition experience would mean a learning curve for the new competition chief and might result in “a cautious enforcement start”. “However, she will have the backing from a very experienced bureaucracy which should allow her to ‘get up to speed’ rather quickly and she will of course in principle need to continue pending investigations and cases,” he said.

According to Wiggers, Donald Trump’s election and the expected shift towards an enforcement that is friendlier to Big Tech under his administration might however cause Ribera Rodríguez to pursue “a stricter EU policy towards large tech companies” over the course of her term.

In her opening statement yesterday, Ribera Rodríguez largely repeated priorities already outlined in a previous policy document meant to guide her enforcement, emphasising her intention to ensure that competition policy continues to be a “facilitator for the innovation and the competitiveness of European companies”.

Ken Daly, managing partner of Sidley Austin’s Brussels office, said Ribera Rodríguez’s comments signalled support for “building European champions in ways that merger control rules might not have allowed” under her predecessor Vestager.

He added: “The question is whether this is merely red meat for MEPs and member states concerned about sluggish growth, or whether we should expect important practical changes to how deals are vetted.”   

Members of the European Parliament mostly quizzed Ribera Rodríguez, who effortlessly switched between French, English and her native Spanish, on energy transition matters as well as the recent, devastating floods in Spain yesterday, with just a few MEPS holding her feet to the fire on competition enforcement.

When Ribera Rodríguez did address competition questions, she talked about the need for both a new instrument to address killer acquisitions and the need for more resources to be able to better enforce the Digital Markets Act.

Emphasising that the recent Illumina judgement had created “an enforcement gap”, she nevertheless remained vague on the form this instrument should take. “We need to come back to assess to what extent we need a new tool because the existing tools do not provide sufficient ways to respond,” she said.

Asked how she would ensure that the EU’s competition unit was sufficiently resourced to enforce the DMA, she conceded the enforcement team was not “sufficiently sized for this purpose” and emphasised the need to find other means to structurally strengthen the Commission’s capacity in this area.

The next step in the confirmation process is for the European Parliament’s 702 members to elect the full college of commissioners during a plenary session scheduled for next week.