Two years after Mario Draghi warned that Europe faced a "slow agony" of relative decline, the audits of what the EU actually did about it are arriving — and they broadly agree. The European Policy Innovation Council (EPIC), the Brussels think tank that runs the Draghi Observatory & Implementation Index, presented figures on Tuesday showing that of the report's 383 recommendations, only 15.7% have been fully implemented. Another 41.3% are partially done. The rest remain in progress or untouched.
Portuguese Renew MEP João Cotrim de Figueiredo put it bluntly at the presentation: "We appear to be sleepwalking, and Draghi already warned us that this will lead to slow agony. I think that was wrong. It's not going to be slow."
The more striking finding is not the number but the pattern. EPIC's founder Antonios Nestoras argues that "Draghi has won the argument in Brussels" — the whole system has realigned around his vocabulary of competitiveness — but that the agenda is "being implemented in spirit only, not in law." Progress has been fastest where competitiveness overlaps with security and defence; it lags worst on the two structural items Draghi cared most about, deepening capital markets and completing the single market. Nestoras calls the blockage what economists call it: a collective action problem, with member states unwilling to move first.
A second assessment, published by Institut Montaigne under the title "Implementing the Draghi Report: The Moment of Truth" — written by François Chimits, Jeanne Lebaudy, Enora Morin and Eve Talkowski — lands on a more generous headline number: roughly 30% legal implementation, broadly on track with the report's own calendar. But its detail points the same way. Two-thirds of that progress came from actions the Commission could take alone. Of the ambitious reforms that require the Parliament and member states to agree, only about 3% are fully implemented.
Both audits converge on the same conclusion: the easy phase is over. More than 60% of Draghi's recommendations are due to be translated into legislative proposals in the coming months, and the interinstitutional "One Europe, One Market Roadmap" agreed in April commits the institutions to adopting 42 priority files by the end of 2027. The proposed European Competitiveness Fund would consolidate 14 separate instruments and nearly triple the share of EU funding flowing to critical sectors — AI, semiconductors, cleantech, defence, space and raw materials. Institut Montaigne projects financial-market recommendations could exceed 80% implementation by end-2027 if the current pipeline holds. That is a lot of conditional tense.
The Draghi report has done what landmark reports do: it changed the conversation. What it has not yet done is change the law at the pace its own diagnosis demands — and the gap between the two is now measurable, twice over. The recommendations that remain are precisely the ones that pit member states against each other: capital markets union, single-market barriers, energy integration. Whether the EU is "sleepwalking" or "broadly on track" depends on which scorecard you prefer, but both point to the same 18 months. If the 42 priority files stall in Council the way past single-market pushes have, the two-year anniversary will look, in retrospect, like the high-water mark of the competitiveness agenda rather than its midpoint.
