Launching the IE Competitiveness Hub in Brussels, the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola said that competitiveness is about companies growing and scaling, about people having stable jobs and about protecting the open markets and social safety nets that define our European way.
Thank you, dear Enrico. Dear colleagues, I am very happy to be here. And it was a pleasure to attend the open meeting with IE in Madrid two years ago. That set the scene for something that I do almost every week, where I visit a different country and engage with young people, and get a real perspective of what they want from us. But also, how we can make their life a little bit better. And in essence, this is what we are discussing today: how are we going to send the strongest of messages that, first of all, we know what we’re doing. And secondly, we are working to make the life of that younger generation better. Nothing more, nothing less. We talk a lot about competitiveness. It has become the word of the moment. But behind the buzzword is something much more fundamental. Ultimately, it is about whether our companies have what they need to succeed in a world that is not waiting for anyone. And when those companies compete, thrive, and scale, when people have stable jobs, when our businesses are strong and our economy is growing, that is what funds our hospitals, that is what funds our schools, that is what keeps us safe by investing in our security and our defence, and that is what protects the open markets and social safety nets that define our European way. Today, I would like to make three points. The first is that, over the years, our Europe has delivered for people in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and as we mark Europe Day later this week, I think that is something worth celebrating. The second is that the job is far from finished, and that in a world that feels like it is lurching from one crisis to the next, the answer must be a better and more efficient Europe – one that steps up, with courage and political will. And my third point is that something has now fundamentally changed, even over the past few years, that there is a genuine sense of urgency across our institutions and our Member States. Europe is moving, and the direction is clear. I would not have been able to say this a couple of years ago. We have built together a Single Market of nearly half a billion people. Different languages, different traditions, different histories, all moving, trading, building freely across borders - well, almost – and I will come back to that later. We built it ourselves, step by step, often through very hard and painful decisions. And fundamentally, it has paid off - for businesses that found new markets; for workers whose industries grow; for families with more choice and opportunity; for a generation of young Europeans who grew up with freedoms their parents could only dream of. From Lisbon to Tallinn, from Athens to Helsinki, our Single Market has raised living standards and opened horizons. And sometimes I think we do not say this loudly enough, and importantly, we do not say this proudly enough. But at the same time – and, as we know from your report Enrico - the job is not finished. I met with the Prime Minister of Canada on Sunday evening, and your report was the second point mentioned. And it was in the spirit of trying to identify what gaps we have, but with a sense of opportunity and forward-looking approach that we can achieve. These kinds of meetings also did not used to happen a few years, or even months ago. When we look back over the last years, if we look critically, we can say that we have been coasting, we have been telling ourselves the hard work was behind us, that we could afford to take our foot off the pedal. If these past few years have shown us anything, it is that we absolutely cannot do that. Enrico, there is one aspect of your report that I could not get out of my head. You say that the effective cost of selling services from one EU country to another is the equivalent of a 110% tariff. Think about that for a moment, dear colleagues. We spend years in painstaking negotiations to shave a few percentage points off trade barriers with partners around the world, and all the while, we have barriers many times that size between our own Member States. I just met the Nasdaq CEO earlier today, and this was one of the points she made. If you will allow me this metaphor, we are basically trying to run a race with our own shoelaces tied together. Every week, and here I can speak on behalf of my fellow Members of the European Parliament elected almost two years ago, we meet entrepreneurs, small and large businesses owners, we also meet constituents with families. And what they are telling us right now is that they are facing pressure from three directions all at once: energy costs skyrocketing because of instability in the Gulf and not only, hitting margins before a product has even reached the market; so much red tape that board meetings are spent on compliance rather than growth; fierce competition from other economies that have made a very deliberate choice to massively subsidise their industries. And behind every one of those businesses are people. People who want job security. People opening their bills every month and feeling the squeeze. People, frankly, who voted for a Europe that they want to work for them. Which brings me to my third point: Europe is responding. I see a fundamental shift around the European Council table. The urgency is real and you can feel it. What we did last week in Cyprus, signing the One Europe, One Market’ roadmap, would have taken months of negotiation at least. In the European Parliament, we recognise that urgency. Precisely because we talk to our constituents who are telling us what we should push for: a very concrete and ambitious roadmap, built around the simple idea that our Single Market is the answer to most of the questions that are being asked of us right now. The job is ours to press our foot to the pedal to turn that into delivery, and that means that we will do our job. We have no choice. This means that we need to move ahead on three fronts. The first is funds – how do we get capital flowing to where it is needed. At the centre of this roadmap is the Savings and Investments Union, which is probably the most important thing we can deliver this year. Europe has no shortage of savings, but the problem is that we are not channelling them into growth. Other economies invest far more of their household savings into productive capital than we do. Sweden’s Investment Savings Account is a good example of what is possible in Europe, and we see also other countries, like Poland for example, going down the same route, which is a very innovative way of changing the mindset of how money flows, how money is invested, and citizens’ role in that. That gap in investment, in jobs, in capacity to innovate, is not inevitable. If our capital markets were better connected, a founder in Estonia, or Spain, or Poland, could access the same depth of funding as one in California, because the savings are there. It means European companies can scale here, rather than having to leave to find the capital they need. The second is energy. This dominates all our discussions right now. The situation in the Gulf is making a difficult situation even harder. European businesses were already paying three times more for electricity than their competitors, and new technologies like artificial intelligence are placing enormous new demands on our energy systems. That gap is unsustainable. We are acting – we are diversifying supply, we are investing in renewables, in nuclear energy, modernising our grids – with differences between Members States. But we have to be honest: how are we going to help those Member States move at the speed that Europe requires, if we want to act as one? And the third and final point is regulation. For years, we have been told that the rules we adopt, collectively, have become too many, they are too complex, they are too difficult to navigate. Sometimes, this is European. But sometimes, it is national, sometimes it is even regional. So what we have created is layer upon layer of gold-plating that together slows everything down. At our level, we are acting – that is what we wanted to do, as soon as the new Parliament took office. We have 10 omnibus packages on the table, 5 almost done. We have a moratorium on new reporting requirements. The drive to cut red tape is at the core of what we do. I do not want to face our voters and tell them: it is not our fault, it is someone else’s. I want to be able to say: we have listened, and we have done this. We still have a lot to do, and we will be honest about it. There are even more proposals on the table that we are going quite fast on, like the 28th regime, and we can expect more. The talent is here. The ideas are here. Our job, collectively, is to make Europe the place where that talent can flourish. The very last thing I will say is this: people remember the moments when Europe became real in their lives, when they could feel it, when they could touch it: Erasmus - that’s when I felt it - free movement, the single currency, mobile phone roaming. That is the standard we hold ourselves to: how we are going to make Europe felt by citizens that vote in elections on the basis of a promise which is Europe. And that should not be underestimated. On Saturday, we celebrate Europe Day. Almost 90% of Europeans say they want more unity. That is something we should take heed of. Thank you.