Draghi Implementation Index: July 2026 Update
Explore the Draghi Observatory
From narrative momentum to delivery discipline
Draghi has won the argument. Europe must now deliver.
Competitiveness has become the organising language of EU policymaking. But how much of the Draghi agenda has been translated into binding law?
The July 2026 update of EPIC’s Draghi Observatory & Implementation Index examines progress since January, identifies the reforms moving forward, and assesses where implementation continues to fall short. Its central finding: Europe is still advancing, but more slowly—and most decisively where competitiveness overlaps with security and strategic dependencies.
Implementation continues, but progress has slowed
Across the 383 measures tracked by the Index, 60 are fully implemented and 98 are partially implemented. The strict implementation rate has reached 15.7%, up from 15.1% in January 2026. Including partially implemented measures, the combined rate stands at 41.3%, compared with 38.9% in January.
This represents a clear slowdown. The combined index increased by 7.5 percentage points between September 2025 and January 2026, but by just 2.4 percentage points in the latest update. A growing legislative pipeline offers the prospect of further progress, but proposals are not yet implementation.
Where Europe is moving—and where it is not
Security is driving delivery. Progress is concentrated in areas such as Russian gas dependency reduction, defence industrial finance and external investment instruments. These developments show how geopolitical pressure can generate the urgency that economic arguments alone often struggle to create.
Simplification is becoming measurable. Changes to sustainability reporting and due-diligence requirements have translated the burden-reduction agenda into binding law, including protections for SMEs and smaller firms in corporate value chains.
Legal frameworks are advancing faster than market outcomes. New financing channels, monitoring systems, digital platforms and coordination mechanisms matter. But they do not yet amount to the deeper capital markets, lower energy costs, stronger Single Market integration and large-scale investment mobilisation envisaged by Draghi.
The case for a European Competitiveness Act
The report calls for a European Competitiveness Act: not a single narrow statute, but a coherent legislative package that turns political agreement into a delivery programme for the remainder of the mandate.
Built around investment and capital markets, energy-cost competitiveness, and Single Market scale, the package would bring together measurable objectives, priority legislative files, a public scoreboard and a binding adoption calendar. Its purpose would be to make responsibilities and trade-offs visible—and ensure that competitiveness becomes a reform programme rather than a shared vocabulary.
About the publication
The July update reviews 34 adopted EU legal acts against the Index’s fixed set of 383 Draghi measures. It includes updated implementation figures, sectoral comparisons, a ranking by responsible European Commission Directorate-General, and annexes documenting the legislation assessed and individual status changes.
The methodology remains deliberately conservative: only adopted EU legal acts count towards implementation. Political declarations, communications and legislative proposals do not. Pending initiatives are assessed as signals of possible future progress, not credited as completed delivery.
