Teresa Ribera has been appointed to succeed Margarete Vestager as EU Competition Commissioner and serve as Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition.

Her appointment comes at a crossroads in EU antitrust enforcement. The past decade has seen an array of significant developments—the implementation of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR); calls for the European Commission (EC) to take account of industrial policy and environmental impact in antitrust enforcement; pressure for the EC to adopt a more interventionist approach to merger control, in particular in the tech, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications sectors; and, most recently, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s report into the future of European competitiveness (the Draghi Report), which questioned whether EU competition enforcement was consistent with the creation of strong European companies capable of competing globally.