“The Draghi report has become the economic doctrine of the EU, and everything we’ve proposed since has been aligned with it,” Stéphane Séjourné, the Commission executive vice president charged with industrial strategy, told POLITICO. Still, he admitted that the “’Draghi effect’ too often fades when legislative texts are discussed by member states.”
A report by the European Policy Innovation Council think tank found that only 11 percent of the Draghi report had been acted on. In the field of energy, no actions have been completed at all.
“It’s national interests, it’s national policies, sometimes it’s party political,” said MEP Anna Stürgkh, who recently authored a European Parliament study on the electricity grid. Speaking at an event about the Draghi report one year on, the Austrian Renew Europe lawmaker explained that it often came down to individual countries not wanting to share cheap energy with their neighbors.
“If they interconnect with countries that have higher energy prices, their prices will go up,” she said. “That is a fact.”
“It’s not the Commission which is not doing the banking union,” Spanish economist and former MEP Luis Garicano said at the same event, referencing the push to break down the thicket of national rules and vested interests that keeps the banking sector fragmented and country-specific. “It’s the governments that don’t actually want to allow the capital to flow from one country to the next.”
That same parochialism comes up again and again, from common debt — vetoed by so-called frugal countries like Germany and the Netherlands — to defense or to financial sector integration. It doesn’t help that countries are tightening their belts after the Covid-era spending splurge, leaving little money to pursue strategic aims.