Implementing the Draghi Report: The Moment of Truth

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Mario Draghi sounded the alarm in September 2024: without radical change, he warned, Europe’s economy is at a serious risk of “slow agony” in an increasingly competitive world. His landmark report on the Future of European Competitiveness offered not only this diagnosis, but also prescribed a comprehensive and transformative roadmap to avoid a dreadful decline.

Close to two years on, how much of this agenda has actually been delivered? Drawing on an unprecedented database tracking the advancement of 567 policy recommendations, and extensive interviews with European policymakers and stakeholders, Institut Montaigne has conducted a rigorous assessment of the report’s implementation up to May 2026, as well as the prospect of evolution over the next 18 months. The result offers both a quantitative and qualitative view of where Europe stands relative to Draghi’s plan, including more specifically across the report’s five overarching themes — innovation, decarbonisation, security, investment, governance — and twenty individual policy areas.

The findings show a 30% implementation rate of the report's recommendations, mostly through less cumbersome Commission-led actions, putting the Europeans broadly on track with the calendar the report sets for implementation. More importantly, more than half of Draghi's recommendations are tabled for negotiations between EU legislators in the next twelve months.

There are reasons to be optimistic, yet European competitiveness continues to deteriorate. To provide an assertive response to the magnitude of the challenge, being on a track of a 2024 plan is not enough. Europeans will still have to find a way to deliver faster and more decisive reforms to preserve their long-term prosperity and freedom in the more challenging environment unfolding before our eyes. Europe is thus now entering the “crunch time” of implementation.

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Our analysis evaluates the legal implementation, here understood in a broad sense to include both legislative and non-legislative texts, of the actionable recommended policy actions put forward in the Draghi report.

For this study, a total of 567 recommendations were extracted from the 20 policy areas found in part B of the Draghi Report, analyzed across four analytical dimensions, namely: the time horizon assigned by the report, the actors responsible for progress and hindrances, the corresponding legal vehicle, and the current status of legal implementation. All 567 recommendations were isolated, using the support of an AI tool, and categorized as “general” and “detailed” recommendations.

Each detailed recommendation was then compared with EU and national measures taken between September 9, 2024, and May 1, 2026. A recommendation is registered in the database as “in the pipeline” if the identified measure has been proposed but not yet adopted, as “partially implemented” if the adopted measures do not match the specific wording of the recommendation, and as “fully implemented” if they do. All others are listed as “no action.”

The implementation rate for each detailed recommendation is then derived from the distance between the initial recommendation and the identified actions. The implementation rate for each “general” recommendation is then calculated using the average of the “detailed” recommendations found beneath it, weighted by a complexity index developed by Institut Montaigne.

Taken together, these measures provide implementation rates for the entire report.

▶ Click here to access the full methodology.

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