EU Leaders Hold The Key: They Must Enable Open and Competitive Markets to Unlock Europe’s Potential

Europe Unlocked has high expectations for next month’s meeting of EU leaders in Budapest, and we hope this will conclude with a clearer vision of what competitiveness means in practice.    

We believe that open and competitive markets offer the best path to a more prosperous future and that this must be a guiding principle in policy development. An overconfidence in state interventionism and building self-sufficiency risks leading Europe down a blind alley, because neither of these things is going to help the broad business community in Europe to compete internationally. While the world is undeniably going through a period of disruption, it is wrong to conclude that turning inwards is the only answer. Global trade is not at an end, it is going through a period of disruption, and we need to have the foresight to navigate that rather than disengage.  

And the only way to boost Europe’s competitiveness, raise its productivity and ultimately to restore prosperity in the EU is to create the conditions for businesses to thrive. 

Champions are not picked by politicians. They emerge in a vibrant, open economy. Efforts to craft an industrial policy designed to create a few industrial titans does very little for the vast majority of European businesses.  

This is why Europe Unlocked has issued a Call to Action for EU leaders, ahead of their meeting in Budapest. 

We call on EU leaders to return to the economic fundamentals of a thriving market economy.  

Our Call to Action spells it out. Europe needs to create a properly functioning single market; unlock the potential of Europe’s digital economy; deliver better regulation; foster the EU’s strengths in global trade; ensure an efficient green transition; and build an agile workforce for a sustainable, knowledge-based economy.