Europe Ignored Most of Draghi’s Ideas. Why?

Next week, Ursula von der Leyen and Mario Draghi meet to discuss Europe’s economic future, and the gap between strategy and delivery will be in sharp focus. Last year, Draghi laid out 383 recommendations to boost EU competitiveness – yet about 90% remain ignored. At the same time, the Europe Future Forum in Warsaw will be asking why Europe has failed to act, and what it must do to avoid further industrial decline.

One late afternoon last March, I received a call from a European Commission representative. He asked whether I would be interested, under certain conditions, in joining a select group of journalists in the EU who would receive an exclusive briefing about new EU strategic projects under the Critical Raw Materials Act, and publish an article when the embargo was lifted.

I agreed. At the time, I had written about European dependency on critical materials in several articles and in a chapter of my freshly published book. Among the three dozen selected projects were two Czech ones I had described in detail – focused on the mining and production of rare materials such as manganese and lithium. Crucially, these projects did not concern extraction alone but also processing, which is precisely what Europe has long been lacking.