EU politicians weigh in on Draghi report

Mario Draghi’s long-awaited report on European competitiveness has been met with praise and reservations by MEPs. Centrist politicians hope for a speedy correction of EU industrial policies, while conservatives fear accelerated spending, and the far-left warns of monopolies. 

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on Monday (9 September) generally welcomed the report by the former Italian prime minister.  

The report is “a wake-up call to policymakers both in the Member States and in Brussels: we need to take swift and significant action on EU competitiveness,” Christian Ehler, a German MEP for the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), said in a statement.  

Draghi’s report – requested a year ago by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – argues that Europe is struggling with weakening productivity and calls for a bold industrial policy that invests in digitalisation, green technology and key industries, particularly defence.  

Whether the Draghi Report might affect the “mission letters” von der Leyen will send each commissioner – and the structure of the EU executive itself – remains uncertain. 

According to Lorenzo Castellani, a politics lecturer at Luiss University in Rome, the document is “more of a programmatic guide, a blueprint for how the Commission should be organized,” implying that its influence may be more organizational than structural. “If the report has any impact, it will likely be more on the policy or program level,” he added. 

Martin Schirdewan, one of the co-chairs of the Parliament’s most far-left bloc (The Left), slammed the report as the work of industry lobbyists but said he feared it would set the commission’s agenda. 

“I fear even though it falls short of what is needed now, it’s going to be quite influential,” Schirdewan told Euractiv in an interview. He said he worries that the Commission and the Parliament’s liberal and conservative blocs “will always refer to this report as kind of a playbook for a European industry and economic strategy.” 

Not everyone on the far left was as critical as Schirdewan. In a statement, Pasquale Tridico of Italy’s Five Star Movement, which is part of the Left, said, “The Draghi report contains a lucid indictment of the neoliberal policies on which the current European scaffolding rests.”  

Some more centre-left lawmakers also welcomed Draghi’s investment-focused approach. In an interview with Euractiv, Sergey Lagodinsky of Germany’s Greens echoed Tridico by calling it “a certified indictment” against Europe’s prevailing “budgetary discipline fetish.”  

Meanwhile, Anders Vistisen, a Danish MEP from the nationalist Patriots for Europe group, said in a statement: “The idea that massive state aid with borrowed money should be the cornerstone of the recovery of the European economy is madness.”

He added that the same goes for the green transition, “which will only dig Europe deeper into the economic quagmire it finds itself in”, stating that the EU should instead reduce regulation, Vistisen argued.

How much of Draghi’s report member states will embrace remains to be seen. “The Commission can use this report to see whether Member States have the political will to bring about real change and coordination at an EU level,” said Eva Maydell, Bulgarian MEP from the centre-right EPP.  

Hélder Sousa Silva, an EPP legislator from Portugal, told Euractiv he “strongly supports [s] the call for common debt mechanisms, such as EU defence bonds, to finance our strategic initiatives.” But he highlighted concerns also raised by Draghi about the EU’s budget constraints and the repayment of joint debt from the COVID era, which make it harder for the EU to invest.  

An economist and banker, Mario Draghi has played influential roles in European and global finance. He was President of the European Central Bank (ECB) from 2011 to 2019, steering it through the Eurozone debt crisis and implementing monetary policies that helped stabilise the euro. His tenure at the helm of the ECB became defined by his vow to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. 

In February 2021, he was appointed as the technocratic and non-partisan prime minister of Italy’s multi-party national unity government. As Italian premier, he again faced political and economic instability due to the Covid-19 crisis. He left office in October 2022 after an election in which he did not run, eight months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

[Edited by Owen Morgan]

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