Europe’s push to rebuild its industrial base moved from rhetoric toward hard law this week, as the European Parliament’s environment committee began shaping its position on the Industrial Accelerator Act. Tabled by the Commission in March, the regulation sets an unusually blunt target for a bloc that has traditionally trusted markets to allocate capital: manufacturing should make up at least a fifth of the Union’s economic output by 2035, reversing a long decline that has thinned factory employment from the Ruhr valley to northern Italy. The proposal rests on three pillars, each touching a nerve in the argument over how far Brussels should intervene. The first targets demand, embedding low-carbon and European-origin criteria into public procurement and state aid schemes across strategic sectors, and pointing the bloc’s enormous purchasing power toward domestic producers of clean technology, steel and vehicles. The second targets speed, pulling energy-intensive projects that sharply cut emissions into the accelerated permitting regime created for the Net-Zero Industry Act and shaving away the administrative delays that manufacturers blame for pushing fresh investment toward the United States and Asia. The third targets ownership, requiring prior approval for large acquisitions and greenfield projects by investors from countries that dominate global capacity in a given sector. Supporters inside the Commission frame the Act as a response to a decade of uncomfortable data. Energy prices remain structurally higher than those faced by American or Chinese rivals, several flagship chemical and automotive plants have announced closures, and the bloc’s share of global clean-technology production has slipped even as demand has surged. Without a demand signal and faster permits, officials argue, Europe risks decarbonising by deindustrialising, importing the very technologies the Green Deal was written to nurture at home. Yet the plan has drawn sharp criticism, including from economists broadly sympathetic to its aims. Analysts at the Bruegel think tank warn that local-content rules could raise costs for the same manufacturers they mean to help, fragment the single market as governments compete to shelter national champions, and invite retaliation from trading partners already bruised by tariff disputes. Procurement preferences, they note, sit awkwardly beside the Union’s own commitments at the World Trade Organization. There is also the perennial question of money, since the Act leans heavily on national budgets and existing funds rather than fresh common financing, leaving poorer member states worried they cannot match the subsidies of wealthier neighbours. The committee’s opinion is only one strand of a negotiation that will run through several parliamentary committees and the Council before any text becomes law, and industry groups, unions and environmental organisations are already lobbying hard over the definitions of strategic and low-carbon. For energy-intensive employers the stakes are immediate, since the permitting provisions could determine whether planned investments in Europe proceed at all. For now the Accelerator Act remains a statement of intent as much as a rulebook, and the coming months will reveal whether the Union can agree on a shared industrial policy or merely twenty-seven competing ones.