Germany will challenge EU ban on combustion engines, chancellor says

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz raised the pressure on the European Commission to rethink its course of fully banning combustion engines in comments on Saturday.

"We will not continue to adhere to this stubborn and misguided combustion engine ban in the European Union," Merz told a regional party conference of his conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Magdeburg. "We must remain a strong industrial location."

From today's perspective, electric mobility is still the "main road," Merz said.

Nevertheless, there will be other drive technologies, such as hybrid drives or drives that people may not yet be familiar with, he added. "We in politics do not know today what technology will be possible tomorrow."

Politically motivated bans should not lead to setbacks, according to the chancellor.

The EU decided in 2022 that new cars would no longer be allowed to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) from 2035, in an effort to meet the bloc's climate targets.

Germany's ruling coalition partners - the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the CSU and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) - are pushing for a softening of the EU decision to phase out combustion engines.

Merz has written a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to this effect.

The regulation aims to further reduce emissions of climate-damaging carbon dioxide in transport. But because electric cars are not catching on quickly enough, pressure is mounting to reverse the decision.

Climate change is "a very serious problem that no one should dispute" and which now affects many companies as well as agriculture and forestry, Merz told the party conference.

This necessitates every possible measure to help reduce CO2 emissions - "But not with bans, not with regulation, not with dying industries, but with state-of-the-art technology," said the chancellor.