Following the EU special representative Mario Draghi, the German industry association now also sees companies in a crisis. A commentary by Georg Anastasiadis.
Munich – Europe’s economy is in a “slow death throes,” warned the EU’s Commissioner for Competitiveness, Mario Draghi, on Monday. Yesterday, the Federation of German Industries (BDI) went one step further: a fifth of industrial value creation in Germany is under threat. The “silent exodus” of many medium-sized companies in particular, who have lost faith in the political will to reform, has long since begun. To restore competitiveness with the USA and China, private and public investments of 1.4 trillion euros are needed by 2030.
Expensive energy and high taxes, a shortage of workers and excessive bureaucracy are stifling growth. The government likes to dismiss this as the opposition or lobby groups painting a doom-mongering picture. But one look at former industrial icons and guarantors of prosperity such as VW, BASF and ThyssenKrupp is enough to see the “distress” that more and more companies are in, according to the BDI. The whole country has lived off its assets for too long (and long before the traffic light coalition took office) and now has to cope with dilapidated infrastructure and a digital backlog.
To remain competitive – Europe needs a change of direction
Competitiveness was long low on the list of priorities for politicians in Brussels and Berlin. Instead, Ursula von der Leyen’s “Green Deal”, the phase-out of combustion engines, detailed heating regulations and the supply chain law with the associated additional bureaucracy were in vogue. According to the Draghi report, 13,000 legal acts were passed in the EU between 2019 and 2024 alone, well over twice as many as in the USA.
If Europe does not want to gamble away its future, it needs a fundamental change of direction. Neither our welfare state model nor the green transformation nor the admission of hundreds of thousands of refugees can be paid for in the long term if we do not succeed in unleashing new growth forces. Europe must overcome the green thinking that only shrinking and renunciation will climate And Germany will have to invest a lot of money, regardless of the debt brake, to make the location fit for the future. ([email protected])
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