Frustrated by two years of inaction on his landmark competitiveness report, Mario Draghi has launched a private initiative to force Europe’s economic overhaul into motion. The former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister unveiled the Rhine Group on August 24, 2026, assembling 57 specialists and corporate leaders to push concrete reform projects.
Draghi presented his original diagnosis to the European Commission in September 2024. Since then, the bloc has implemented just 60 of 383 recommendations tracked by the Draghi Observatory, roughly 15.7 percent. Partial progress lifts that figure above 40 percent, yet the pattern remains troubling. Europe embraces limited measures and declarations while dodging structural changes that would require shared funding, deeper integration, or surrendering national control. The Institut Montaigne, using different methods, estimates legal progress near 30 percent.
The Rhine Group’s manifesto warns that Europe’s position has deteriorated since 2024. The international climate has worsened, internal reforms have lagged, and the bloc keeps falling behind the United States and China. Among the world’s top 50 emerging technology firms, only four are European. Research and ideas fail to become global competitors.
The group insists Europe must move quickly to stimulate investment, build infrastructure, reduce fragmentation, and strengthen autonomy across energy, technology, industry, and defense. The manifesto cautions that stagnation threatens not only businesses but also states’ ability to fund defense, healthcare, pensions, education, and climate transition.
The inaugural session runs September 20-23, 2026. According to El Pais, the group will publish its first proposals after that meeting.
The original Draghi report called for mobilizing 750-800 billion euros annually, nearly 5 percent of EU GDP. It sought a capital markets union, common debt for strategic public goods, and faster decision-making through qualified majority voting. In research and development alone, European companies trail American counterparts by roughly 270 billion euros per year.
Experts acknowledge that immediate implementation in 2024 would not have solved decades of structural decline within two years. However, they estimate real GDP could now be up to 2.2 percent higher, with one to two million additional jobs created.
Adrian Mitroi, a behavioral finance professor at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Sciences, sees a deeper financing problem. “Europe does not understand that only through a low cost of credit can it finance development and risk,” he said. He argues the United States transfers high interest rates and a strong euro onto Europe, making sovereign borrowing expensive and crowding out productive investment.
Europe finances based on balance sheets rather than profit potential, Mitroi added. This leaves critical sectors like artificial intelligence and defense technology without upstream funding capacity. “Europe is only a buyer and therefore must find solutions for the acquisition of these technologies,” he concluded.
