European Tech Sovereignty
Digitalization is now the substrate of European life, yet we remain trapped in a state of critical vulnerability. With more public services provided fully online, any disruption is now a systemic threat to our social and economic stability, as well as our privacy.
Europe is caught in a geopolitical squeeze, facing a US administration weaponizing tech dependency and a China controlling critical materials. This creates an immediate risk of coercion that threatens our strategic autonomy.
The warning shots are clear: systemic outages, rampant disinformation by tech oligarchs, and the political weaponization of digital services. These are not hypothetical concerns but active attacks on our democratic control. The Crowdstrike and Amazon Web Services outages led to the crash of essential services such as transportation across the EU and the shutdown of half of the web. Disinformation and election interference is rampant on social media platforms. The US government has forced Microsoft, Google, Amazon and credit-card companies to stop providing services to judges of the International Criminal Court. According to the Draghi Report the EU relies on foreign countries for over 80% of digital products and infrastructure.
Achieving digital sovereignty is an urgent political mandate to safeguard the Union. We cannot allow opaque tech monopolies to threaten free and fair elections, fuel disinformation, and expose our economy to rising costs for critical services like cloud computing, data storage, and cybersecurity.
Our Goal
The upcoming Tech Sovereignty Package, set for publication end of May 2026, is a litmus moment for our European strategic autonomy. As Greens/EFA, we expect the ambition and courage to build a sovereign European Digital Ecosystem spanning every essential layer of technology - from hardware and infrastructure to data, cloud technology, AI, quantum infrastructure, space infrastructure, chips, messaging and e-mail to social media. Success demands a strategic parallelism in Europe’s approach on tech regulation: on the one hand, the uncompromising enforcement of our digital rulebook and, on the other hand, an ambitious European Digital Industrial Policy fuelled by massive public investment to make real strides.
