The plan comes with a stark warning: Do nothing and Europe “risks to be stuck on a low-growth path, with less income for the employed, less welfare for the disadvantaged, and less opportunities for all.”
Bowing to European Union capitals’ calls to slash red tape that hampers businesses, she’s promising to make an “unprecedented effort to produce simpler rules” and speed up administration.
Some of that will mean cutting back new climate-friendly regulations even as von der Leyen insisted that “the EU stays on course for Green Deal objectives without any question.”
But her policy roadmap stresses that governments will have to step up since “many key levers, from taxation to labour markets to industrial policies, are largely or partly in the hands of EU governments” and they should coordinate national reforms and investment via a Competitiveness Coordination Tool.
It offers a high-level blueprint for how von der Leyen wants to direct the EU during her second term. The message is unequivocal, if vague: Europe must become more business-friendly to match the United States and China, without sacrificing its climate goals in the process. Making that happen, however, will be a titanic feat.
Energy is a big focus as companies complain that high power prices, which soared after Russia invaded Ukraine, make it difficult for them to compete with other parts of the world. The Commission pleads with governments to step up investments in Europe’s power grids and storage facilities to enable the switch toward more renewable power sources.
