Europe Knows What to Do. It Just Doesn’t Do It.
Speaking on Euronews, Antonios Nestoras, Founder and President of the European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC), delivered a stark assessment of Europe’s competitiveness challenge — and of what it reveals about the state of European politics.
Europe’s difficulty in reforming is no longer a technical problem. It is a signal of political decay.
The Draghi Report is the clearest illustration. The diagnosis is widely accepted. The priorities are clear. The trade-offs are known. There is no serious disagreement about what needs to be done to restore Europe’s competitiveness.
And yet, implementation stalls.
This gap between agreement and action is no longer accidental. It reflects a system that struggles to turn consensus into decisions and decisions into reform. Political energy is absorbed by process, sequencing, and institutional caution — while outcomes are postponed.
Competitiveness will not be restored through better coordination, improved messaging, or incremental adjustments. It will come only from political choices — and from acting on what Europe already agrees on.
Delay has become Europe’s default policy. But in a world of accelerating industrial competition, delay is not neutral. It favours those who move faster, invest earlier, and scale sooner.
The Draghi Report was never meant to be inspirational. It was meant to be operational. Treating it as another reference document rather than a reform mandate exposes a deeper problem: Europe’s growing inability to govern itself decisively.
The intervention on Euronews highlighted a simple reality. Europe does not suffer from a lack of ideas. It suffers from a lack of political will to execute them. Until that changes, competitiveness will remain an ambition — not an outcome.
