"To close, I would like to tell you one thing: if these reforms are not made, if we do not take action along these lines, Europe is finished. I repeat: it is over. I tell you this because this is my most frequent nightmare".
In the room on the sixth floor of the European Parliament hosting the meeting between Mario Draghi and all group leaders, a chill descends. The sentence uttered by the former ECB president while explaining the guidelines of his report on competitiveness stuns everyone present.
No one, at least recently, had been so forthright in describing the European Union's predicament. And considering that the former Italian prime minister is appreciated as one of the most authoritative Europeans, that warning resembles a real punch in the stomach.
Draghi first tries to explain that this will not be an ordinary legislature. For the EU, it is not a phase of normality. But of exceptionality. In which ‘great co-responsibility’ and ‘great cooperation’ are needed: ‘rapid and unprecedented reforms’.
Words that will certainly have pleased Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is not attending the meeting but is composing the new executive precisely in the perspective of a ‘co-responsibility’ that should take the form of ‘broad understandings’. Although the ‘draghian’ spirit is entirely conceived in the pro-European groove and offers no concessions to sovereignist and nationalist drifts.
The former governor does not go into the specifics of the report due to be presented next week.
He merely explains that he has constructed his work with a first introductory part in which he recalls the founding ‘values’ of the European Union and western democracy. Then follow ‘ten’ chapters showing the fields in which Europe needs to speed up: from the competitiveness of states to that of companies, from defence to welfare. And above all on Education.
‘In recent decades,‘ is his starting point, “European competitiveness has been subject to a series of ”structural brakes’: lagging innovation capacity, higher energy prices, skills shortages, the need to rapidly accelerate digitalisation and to urgently strengthen Europe's common defence capabilities’.
Its aim is therefore to contribute to the reflection ‘on the challenges facing Europe and how the Union, its institutions, Member States and stakeholders can overcome them together to regain its competitive edge’. ‘It will be up to EU leaders, MEPs, EU institutions and Member States,’ he emphasises, “to decide how to take its work forward and turn its recommendations into concrete results for Europeans”. Even if, it is the clarification offered to the group leaders and the president of the European Parliament Metsola, the report already contains actual legislative measures that can be used immediately.
Draghi's proposals received unanimous applause, particularly from the majority that supports the Commission. ‘Your report,’ says the popular Manfred Weber, ‘is more than welcome. It is not just about finances but about how we want to design the European production sector'. ‘With this work,’ says the leader of the PD group, Nicola Zingaretti, “a push forward towards the integration that Europe needs in order to be the political player the world needs”.
But, indeed, recreation is over and the EU must transform now or risk succumbing in global competition: ‘Either Europe changes or it is over’.
