The conclusions of the reports commissioned by the European Union on the single market and competitiveness are beginning to come to light and are anything but reassuring.
“The world is changing rapidly and it has caught us by surprise,” warned the former president of the European Central Bank and former prime minister of Italy, Mario Draghi, to European leaders meeting in Brussels. The EU's response to these changes “has been limited because our organization, our decision-making process and our financing are designed for yesterday's world. The world before covid, Ukraine, the outbreak in the Middle East and the return to the great rivalry between powers,” said the Italian a few hours before the start of the first European summit in years focused on competitiveness.
“We need an EU at the level of the world of today and tomorrow, and what I propose in the report that the President of the Commission commissioned me is a radical change, it is what is needed,” said Draghi, one of the most vocal voices. respected members of the European scene – and whose name is being raised again to preside over the next Commission – during a conference held on Wednesday in La Hulpe (Belgium). The Draghi report was commissioned by Ursula von der Leyen and will be published after the European elections.
The one that is already known is the one commanded by the European Council to also former Italian prime minister and president of the Jacques Delors Institute, Enrico Letta. And although its scope is more restricted, the single market, it includes a similar diagnosis of the ills that afflict Europe and the way to solve them.
Their proposals basically imply a leap forward in European integration at the level of that which occurred more than 30 years ago in order to overcome the current dispersion, which prevents companies from growing and exploiting the potential of the single market (“very fragmented actually," Letta emphasizes), develop an industrial policy and the union of capital markets to prevent the savings of Europeans from ending up diverted to the US and, in some cases, being used to finance the purchase of European companies. . “We are facing the last opportunity,” warned Letta yesterday, who will present his report to the European Council today, Thursday.
In his speech at La Hulpe, Draghi fired from the first minute. The EU missed the mark in the years following the sovereign debt crisis, he said in a clear allusion to the policy promoted by Berlin: “We deliberately launched ourselves into a strategy of lowering labor costs” with respect to neighboring European countries, “ thus weakening our domestic demand and our social model,” he launched. Instead of trying to rival the world, “we become our own competitors.”
Meanwhile, other global actors have stopped respecting international rules with protectionist policies such as those adopted by the United States to “attract manufacturing capabilities to its territory, including European companies,” which are also harmed by the high costs of energy and transportation. excessive regulation and the EU has not reacted. “Without coordinated strategic political actions at European level, some energy-intensive industries will have to leave Europe or close,” stressed Draghi, who sees it as urgent to design a true European industrial policy to transform the economy, leaving current dependencies behind.
But not all the money that the EU must invest can come from public funds, the two Italian politicians point out. What would really change everything would be the union of the European capital markets. Draghi suggests that if it is not possible to move forward all at once, a group of countries that are determined to Europeanize their financial supervision or insolvency laws should do so first. These changes, they agree, are key to allowing large European companies to grow and be able to compete with those from the US or China, promoting the creation of European champions in key sectors such as telecommunications.
