Antonios Nestoras / Jul 2026
Photo: Shutterstock
Is Mario Draghi losing momentum? No, not yet. No, because the central argument of his report has become the organizing language of European politics. Not yet, because the real test of momentum is not whether European leaders cite Draghi, but whether they are willing to implement his ideas.
In Brussels, Draghi has won the narrative. Competitiveness is now the lens through which every EU regulation is discussed. The European Commission's Competitiveness Compass is explicitly built on the Draghi and Letta reports, and the Commission has said that roughly 90 percent of the Compass's flagship initiatives are directly inspired by Draghi's most pressing recommendations. National capitals that once treated competitiveness as a sectoral concern now invoke it as a strategic imperative. The whole policymaking ecosystem has adopted the language of scale, productivity, resilience, and investment.
But narrative momentum is not implementation momentum, and the Draghi report’s very success now creates a new risk: that it becomes a Brussels vocabulary rather than a reform program. Everyone agrees Europe needs competitiveness. The harder question is who pays for it, who enforces it, and who gives up the national protections and institutional habits that prevent Europe from acting at scale.
What the implementation trackers show
EPIC’s Draghi Observatory, in its first-anniversary assessment, found that one year after the report, only 43 recommendations — 11.2 percent — had been fully implemented, with another 77 partially implemented. The January 2026 update, based on legislation adopted through that month, recorded further progress: full implementation rose to 15.1 percent, and full-plus-partial implementation to 38.9 percent. (A new update is due in September.) Progress is real but uneven and slow relative to the urgency of the diagnosis.
Institut Montaigne's new assessment, reported by the Financial Times as showing 30 percent implementation, sounds more optimistic. But the difference is mostly methodological, not substantive. Montaigne’s figure is a weighted legal implementation rate. Its own underlying categories show that 18 percent of its detailed recommendations are fully implemented, 23 percent are partially implemented, 20 percent are in the pipeline, and 39 percent have no formal action. Adding full and partial implementations together puts Montaigne near 41 percent—very close to EPIC’s 38.9 percent.
Strip away the framing, and the two efforts are telling close to the same story: roughly one recommendation in six has been fully implemented in legal terms, and not much more than a third has moved at all, fully or partially. That is the gap a European Competitiveness Act would close.
From vocabulary to delivery architecture
The Commission has moved: the agenda was set in the first part of the mandate. Yet the institutional picture remains uneven. Much of the progress so far has come through funding instruments, simplification proposals, sectoral initiatives, or extensions of policies already in motion — useful, but not yet transformative.
The core weakness is political. Draghi's agenda cuts across Europe's comfort zones. It requires deeper capital markets, not another roundtable on capital markets union; lower and more predictable energy costs, not new targets alone; faster permitting, not better guidelines; public procurement that creates lead markets for European technology; and telecoms, defence, energy, and financial markets that can scale across borders. Above all, it requires member states to accept that strategic autonomy cannot be built on 27 industrial reflexes and fragmented pools of capital.
So, "Is Draghi losing momentum?" is slightly the wrong question. Draghi is not losing intellectual momentum — he is losing implementation density, and the trackers now quantify that. The agenda is dispersed across directorates-general, Council formations, parliamentary committees, national ministries, and half-connected legislative files. The result is activity without concentration, movement without force.
The Fit for 55 precedent — and its warning
Europe has faced this problem before. The European Green Deal became politically real when it was translated into Fit for 55: not a single law but a legislative package with a target, a timetable, and institutional pressure that forced the Commission, Parliament, and Council to negotiate across sectors because the package itself created a delivery architecture.
It is also a cautionary tale, and a fair critic will raise it. Fit for 55 generated a cost-of-living and rural backlash that the current Commission is now partially unwinding through "simplification" and deregulation. A European Competitiveness Act would need to sequence costs and benefits differently than Fit for 55 did. Whatever one thinks of its individual components, however, Fit for 55 showed that the EU can convert a strategic priority into a legislative cycle.
A European Competitiveness Act
The Draghi agenda now needs the Fit for 55 treatment: a European Competitiveness Act, a legislative package that consolidates the remaining implementation of Draghi's recommendations into a single political vehicle for the rest of the mandate.
This should be an implementation with measurable objectives, priority files, a public scoreboard, and a binding adoption calendar — built to move Europe from competitiveness as rhetoric to competitiveness as discipline.
The Competitiveness Act should rest on three pillars that deserve priority because they are the most economically consequential and the most politically blocked: first, investment and capital markets; second, energy-cost competitiveness; and third, Single Market scale. But its scope should be broader still, mirroring the full breadth of Draghi's agenda — including, and especially, the recommendations no existing legislation has yet touched at all.
The timing is right
EU policymaking does not follow the usual rhythm of a national political honeymoon. The early phase of a mandate is dominated by agenda-setting. The later phase is when co-legislative pressure intensifies, as Parliament and the Council seek to close dossiers before the next electoral reset. If Draghi defined the first phase of this Commission's economic agenda, a European Competitiveness Act should define the second — and the trackers suggest there is no time to lose.
A single competitiveness package would make the trade-offs politically visible. It would stop the co-legislators from applauding Draghi in general while blocking him in particular, and debate competitiveness as a coherent model rather than a series of isolated files. Additionally, it would give industry and citizens a clearer sense of what the EU is trying to deliver.
Draghi has issued a fair warning and won the argument. The Commission has generated moderate institutional momentum. Political implementation remains too weak and too fragmented, on every available measure. The next step is a European Competitiveness Act to see the Draghi agenda through.
