‘Made in Europe’ or ‘Made to Measure’? The Legal Fault Lines of the Industrial Accelerator Act

The Industrial Accelerator Act, proposed by the European Commission in March 2026 and now subject to trilogue negotiations, promises to reforge European industrial policy around a single, deceptively simple idea: preference for what is ‘Made in Europe’. Yet behind this slogan lies a thicket of legal ambiguities, jurisdictional tensions, and trade-law vulnerabilities that may render the Act’s most ambitious provisions as fragile as they are attractive. The Council’s recent ‘partner origin’ compromise, circulated under the Irish presidency in late July 2026, does not resolve these tensions but it redistributes them.

The ambition and its discontents

The Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA), formally presented as COM(2026) 100, is the legislative centrepiece of the Commission’s Clean Industrial Deal. Its declared ambition is to reverse a decade of deindustrialisation by lifting manufacturing’s share of European Union gross domestic product from 14.3 per cent in 2024 to 20 per cent by 2035—a target first articulated in the Draghi report on European competitiveness and since elevated to the status of political gospel. To achieve this, the Act introduces ‘Made in EU’ and low-carbon preferences across public procurement and public support schemes, targeting strategic sectors including steel, cement, aluminium, batteries, solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles.

The political impetus is not difficult to understand: the ‘weaponisation of economic dependencies’—a phrase which recurs throughout the Act’s explanatory memorandum—has become the defining anxiety of European industrial strategy. Confronted simultaneously with Chinese overcapacity in clean technologies and the residual protectionism of the United States’ tariff regime, the Commission has concluded that the single market must be leveraged as an industrial instrument rather than treated as a neutral trading arena. In this, Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné and more than 1,100 chief executives across the continent speak with one voice.

Yet the very breadth of this ambition generates the Act’s central legal difficulty: preference for European products, administered through public money and market access, is not politically neutral but a form of discrimination—and discrimination, in international trade law, is not a compliment.

What ‘made in Europe’ actually means — and does not

Under the Commission’s original proposal, Articles 8 and 9 of the IAA provide that content originating in third countries party to a free-trade agreement with the Union, or to the World Trade Organisation’s Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), shall be deemed to be of Union origin for the purposes of procurement preferences and public support. This is, on its face, a relatively generous formulation—one which, by some estimates, would have qualified as many as eighty countries for ‘Made in Europe’ treatment. 

The breadth of this approach unsettled a number of member states, most vocally France, which pressed for a narrower club of beneficiaries. Commissioner Séjourné subsequently indicated that the list might be confined to other countries. The Commission, in other words, proposed a definition expansive enough to alarm protectionists, then privately hinted at a scope restrictive enough to alarm free-traders.

The Act’s legal architecture compounds the confusion: the Commission reserved to itself a broad discretion to exclude third countries from ‘Made in Europe’ eligibility on grounds of failure to provide national treatment, concerns over strategic dependency, or threats to security of supply: these criteria reflect genuine and documented vulnerabilities but they are also inherently susceptible to political operationalisation. An exclusion power this wide, exercised through delegated acts subject to limited parliamentary oversight, is an administrative lever, and one whose activation will inevitably be read by trading partners as a hostile act.

The ‘partner origin’ compromise: tidier, but not tidy

In an attempt to impose greater legal rigour upon this construction, the Irish Council presidency has circulated a compromise text introducing a new category of ‘partner origin’. Rather than treating all free-trade partners as equally qualified, the presidency’s proposal distinguishes between products covered by the WTO Government Procurement Agreement and those falling under individual EU free-trade or customs-union arrangements. 

Crucially, eligibility would depend not on the mere existence of an agreement but on the Union’s actual procurement commitments in respect of the specific product in question. The Commission would be required to maintain a publicly accessible, product-specific list of qualifying countries through its Access2Markets portal.

This is a procedural improvement: by substituting implementing acts for delegated acts, the compromise affords member states a formal role in the inclusion or removal of third countries—a meaningful constitutional correction to the Commission’s original design. 

The requirement that procuring authorities relying on Access2Markets data incur no liability for erroneous information is a sensible concession to administrative practicality. And the insistence on product-level specificity, rather than country-level generality, reflects a more honest engagement with the complexity of contemporary global supply chains. Yet the compromise does not resolve the Act’s deeper tensions: the binary question of whether a given product from a given country qualifies for ‘partner origin’ treatment will, in practice, require an administrative apparatus of considerable sophistication. 

The Access2Markets portal is a useful tool for customs classification but was not designed as the gatekeeper of a continent-wide industrial policy: investing it with that function risks both overburdening a technical database and underselling the legal significance of the distinctions it will be asked to draw.

The legislative calendar and its discontents

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared her intention to see the IAA enacted before the close of 2026: this is an aspiration rather than a timetable. The Commission’s proposal, which emerged only in March 2026 following a protracted drafting process, is now subject to negotiation in both the Council and the European Parliament, with the Parliament’s position not expected to crystallise before September. 

The Council’s ‘partner origin’ compromise, welcome as it is, represents a significant departure from the Commission’s text—which means that trilogue negotiations, when they begin, will be substantive rather than technical. The mandatory European-content thresholds for steel, cement, and aluminium have already seen their 2029 implementation date placed at risk; and what were presented as mandatory industrial acceleration areas have been quietly rendered optional in the Council text.

Conclusion: the label and the contents

There is an old European distinction between law on the books and law in action. The Industrial Accelerator Act, as it stands, risks being a third category: law in aspiration—a legislative instrument whose central concept is legally contested, whose key definitions remain administratively unresolved, and whose implementation timeline is already slipping before the ink is dry.

None of this is to suggest that the Act’s underlying objectives are unworthy: the strategic case for reducing European dependence on external suppliers in critical industrial sectors is compelling, and the Draghi report’s diagnosis of European underinvestment is difficult to dispute. But the strength of a political case does not determine the durability of a legal instrument: a ‘Made in Europe’ label that cannot withstand scrutiny at the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, or that collapses under the weight of its own definitional complexity, serves no one’s industrial interests.

The Council’s ‘partner origin’ compromise is a step in the right direction—procedurally sounder, legally more honest, and institutionally better balanced than the Commission’s original text. But a step in the right direction is not the same as arriving at the destination: the co-legislators would do well to remember, as they enter the trilogue chamber, that what is ‘Made in Europe’ must also be made to last.

Luciano Magaldi Sardella is a PhD and MBA at the European Open University.

Matteo Mantuano is a Professor of Behavioural Economics and Psychology at the Unitré University of Milan.