By bizn_fun 
EU leaders have been warned against a rollback of the green agenda before a summit focused on reviving the bloc’s waning economy.
Campaigners from the Climate Action Network, a pan-European group of NGOs, said European industry was “under real pressure” from “high energy prices, ageing assets, global overcapacity and delayed investments”, but these issues could not be solved by watering down climate and environmental policies.
“Deregulation is not an industrial strategy,” the group wrote in an open letter, which argued that the problems facing energy-intensive industries, including steel, cement and chemicals, were driven by prices of fossil fuel-derived energy and global market dynamics, rather than environmental regulation.
The EU economy has been under pressure over the last year amid Donald Trump’s US tariff trade war. Last week the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, said the eurozone economy “remains resilient in a challenging environment” but the outlook was “uncertain” as it left interest rates on hold.
EU leaders will meet in a chateau in eastern Belgium on Thursday to discuss the “urgent strategic imperative” of strengthening the single market, according to the invitation letter from the European Council president, António Costa. A day before that meeting the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will meet industry leaders in Antwerp.
She will follow up a 2024 summit in the Flemish city when business leaders called for a European industrial deal to complement the EU’s green deal as well as “corrective measures” on existing regulations.
Since then von der Leyen’s commission has proposed 10 “omnibus” proposals to loosen regulation across economic sectors, from the automotive industry to digital, defence, chemicals and farming.
However, the green campaigners argue that the deregulation agenda risks weakening the EU’s carbon price and other policies supporting the energy transition. “Without a strong and predictable carbon price, the business case for clean steel, green chemicals, circular materials and electrified industrial production collapses – and with it, the effectiveness of future industrial policy tools,” their letter says.
A thinktank has reported that Europe is making slow progress towards reviving its weak economy.
The European Policy Innovation Council found that only 15% of the recommendations made by Mario Draghi in a landmark 2024 report had been implemented. Almost two-thirds remain either in progress or have not been implemented at all, according to the Financial Times, which has seen a copy of the thinktank’s latest analysis.
The agenda-setting report by Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and European Central Bank president, set out 383 recommendations for EU institutions and member states. Without such measures, including an annual €800bn investment drive, Draghi said the EU risked a “slow and agonising decline”.
Responding to the EPIC report, the centrist Renew group in the European parliament lamented the slow implementation of Draghi’s agenda.
It said there were too many internal hurdles in the EU single market, citing International Monetary Fund research showing EU regulatory barriers were equivalent to a 44% tariff on goods and 110% on services.
“While we are rightly horrified by the prospects of new US tariffs, we seem to be strangely complacent about the ‘internal tariffs’ we self-inflict,” the letter said. “We are in effect sanctioning our own economy.”
In an attempt to aid Europe’s stagnant economy, the commission will publish in the coming weeks an Industrial Accelerator Act, including proposals to boost clean tech that are expected to introduce a “buy European” preference in strategic sectors.