AbstractMotivated by applications in economics and engineering, we consider the optimal control of a variational inequality with point evaluations of the state variable in the objective. This problem class constitutes a specific mathematical program with complementarity constraints (MPCC). In our context, the problem is posed in an adequate function space and the variational inequality involves second order linear elliptic partial differential operators. The necessary functional analytic framework complicates the derivation of stationarity conditions whereas the non‐convex and non‐differentiable nature of the problem challenges the design of an efficient solution algorithm. In this paper, we present a penalization and smoothing technique to derive first order type conditions related to C‐stationarity in the associated Sobolev space setting. (© 2013 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)