Ahead of a Thursday EU leaders’ retreat on competitiveness, von der Leyen said member states need to get their own houses in order.
“We must also look at the national level, there is too much gold-plating — the extra layers of national legislation that just make businesses’ lives harder and create new barriers in our single market,” she said.
Ahead of the leaders’ summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz published a paper blaming Brussels’ regulation for Europe’s economic malaise.
But von der Leyen argued that countries are also to blame: “If we are serious about simplification, we must crack down on gold-plating and fragmentation. It is time for a deep regulatory housecleaning, at all levels.”
She gave the example of discrepant weight limits for trucks in France and Belgium — two neighboring countries — which makes transport more complicated.
“We proposed legislation to harmonise this. Almost two years later, it is still under discussion,” she said, while also pointing out that many simplification bills in Brussels are still stuck in negotiations between EU countries and the European Parliament.