Weeks after Parliament’s tobacco tax collapse, rapporteur urges Irish Presidency not to let committee’s work go to waste

Two weeks on from the European Parliament’s failure to agree any position on the revision of the Tobacco Excise Directive, the file’s rapporteur is going public with a message for the incoming Irish Presidency: don’t let the committee’s work go to waste.

Tomáš Kubín, the Czech MEP from the Patriots for Europe group who steered the file through Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, adopted a scaled-back version of the Commission’s proposal there on 3 June by 32 votes to 21. That text would have kept the minimum excise duty on cigarettes at €200 per 1,000, against the Commission’s proposed €215 (up from the current €90), while giving newer nicotine products such as vapes, heated tobacco and pouches lower rates and longer transition periods.

It never got the chance to matter. When the file reached plenary on 17 June, MEPs voted down not only Kubín’s committee text but also a separate, only lightly amended version of the Commission’s original proposal. With neither option securing a majority, Parliament ended the Cyprus Presidency with no formal opinion on the file at all, an outcome some in Brussels have read as tantamount to Parliament asking the Commission to withdraw the proposal outright.

The fallout has been messier than the vote itself. The centre-left S&D group hailed the result as a win for public health, but critics point out that the group’s real objective was to head off a recurring EPP-far right alliance rather than to hold out for a stronger text, since the compromise or alternative would have preserved the bulk of the Commission’s original tax increases. Kubín has dismissed the health framing outright, telling reporters it amounted to little more than a refusal to work with his group.

In an exclusive interview, Kubín revealed he is keen to keep the committee’s compromise alive as the file moves to the Council’s table:

“My message to the Irish Presidency is simple: don’t let the work of the ECON Committee vanish from the table. This isn’t about making a political statement. It’s about finding something that works for public health, for Member States’ tax revenues, for the internal market, and for the fight against illicit trade. The Commission’s proposal opened a debate worth having, but in several places, it went too far, and it didn’t really grapple with what the changes would mean in practice for Member States, for consumers, for tax administrations, or for legal operators on the ground. ECON took a more realistic route. I do not deny that the Tobacco Taxation Directive needs modernising — new products are on the market, and the current framework is simply outdated. But modernising the rules is not the same thing as pushing through sharp, automatic tax increases. What mattered most in the ECON work was proportionality: a more gradual rollout, more predictable rules, different treatment for different products, and real safeguards against market disruption and illicit trade.

“The Irish Presidency shouldn’t just fall back on the most maximalist version of the proposal — it should treat the ECON position as a serious starting point for a compromise that Member States can implement.”

He added: “The committee has given both the Commission and the Council a very strong position, we know there are member states that agree with us, we ask the Irish presidency to be able to take into consideration what we have delivered; that is what could help public health and citizens alike.”

That’s a harder sell than it might have been before 17 June. The Council remains divided in its own right: the Cypriot Presidency pulled the file from June’s Ecofin agenda after failing to secure unanimity that excise measures require, with Sweden among the member states unwilling to move on the treatment of lower-risk nicotine products. Technical talks are expected to resume this month under Irish stewardship, but Dublin now has to build consensus among member states without any parliamentary opinion, however non-binding, to lean on.

That puts Ireland in an awkward spot of its own. Dublin has traditionally taken one of the toughest lines on tobacco control in the EU and would be a natural ally for a stronger directive. But Sweden’s objection was never about resisting tax increases on cigarettes; it was about protecting the regulatory treatment of novel nicotine products, an area where Ireland’s own instincts sit closer to the Commission’s more cautious approach than to Stockholm’s. Squaring a hard line on tobacco with a compromise that brings Sweden back on side will require the Presidency to find room on novel products without being seen to blur its own public health credentials.

Whether the Irish Presidency treats the ECON committee’s majority as a meaningful signal of where compromise might lie, or starts from a blank page given Parliament’s failure to land on any position, will shape the file for the rest of its term.

As Kubín concluded: “For ECON, this file is something of a test case for how the EU legislates on tax. Good tax policy isn’t measured by how high a proposed rate looks on paper. It’s measured by whether the rules work — enforceable, predictable, economically sound. Tobacco taxation touches almost everything ECON cares about: the internal market, indirect taxation, national revenue, fraud, administrative burden, legal certainty. There’s a public health angle too, obviously, but that doesn’t excuse sloppy tax design.

“Tobacco is not an isolated case. It’s really the most developed example of a broader category — behavioural taxation, taxes designed to steer consumption rather than simply raise revenue. Sugar taxes on soft drinks, levies on ultra-processed food, alcohol taxation — they all raise the same underlying question: how do you use the tax system to influence behaviour without wrecking the market, punishing lower-income consumers disproportionately, or pushing consumption into unregulated channels. Get tobacco taxation wrong, and you set a bad precedent for every future debate on sugar, salt, or anything else Brussels decides deserves a ‘health levy.’ Get it right — gradual, differentiated, enforceable — and you have a template Member States can live with when the next behavioural tax proposal comes along, whatever the product.”