When Mario Draghi presented his report on European competitiveness to the European Parliament on 17 September 2024, he did not hedge. "Europe faces a choice between paralysis, exit or integration," he told MEPs. "Exit has been tried and has not delivered... Paralysis is becoming untenable... So, integration is our only hope left." He put a number on it, too: closing the gap would take "EUR 750-800 billion in additional investment... each year," an effort "more than double that of the Marshall Plan."
Almost a year on, the question is no longer whether Europe agreed with the diagnosis — it did, loudly — but whether it is acting on it. EPIC's Draghi Implementation Index, published at draghiwatch.eu, has been keeping score, tracking how many of the report's 383 recommendations have actually become binding EU law. The latest reading suggests Europe is moving, but slowly, and slowing down.
By the Index's July 2026 preliminary update, 60 of the 383 recommendations — 15.7% — had been fully implemented. Count partial delivery and the figure rises to 158, or 41.3%. That is genuine movement from the January 2026 interim audit, which recorded 58 fully implemented (15.1%) and 149 (38.9%) counting partial progress. But the direction of travel matters more than the level.
Here is the uncomfortable part. In the first stretch after the report landed — September 2025 to January 2026 — the Index's strict-plus-partial score jumped 7.5 percentage points. In the following half-year, February to June 2026, it added just 2.4 points. The pace of delivery has roughly halved. Thirty-four legislative acts were assessed in that second window, and the standout movers were telling: a €90 billion loan facility for Ukraine's defence, a simplification of sustainability-reporting rules, steps on phasing out Russian gas. Europe legislates fastest, in other words, when competitiveness comes wrapped in security.
The July update introduced a first-of-its-kind ranking by directorate-general — the Commission's policy departments — and the spread is stark. The trade department led on strict implementation at 41.7%. The energy department, responsible for the file Draghi treated as Europe's central cost problem, sat at 2.7%. The employment and social-affairs department registered 0.0%. That gap is not an accident of accounting. It maps onto Draghi's own warning that EU firms "face electricity prices that are 2-3 times higher than those in the United States and in China" — precisely the structural cost the slowest-moving department is meant to fix.
EPIC's own prescription is a single, Fit-for-55-style delivery vehicle it calls a "European Competitiveness Act": one package to force the structural reforms that individual files keep dodging. The Commission has so far preferred its softer "Competitiveness Compass," the roadmap it unveiled in January 2025.
The one-year verdict on Draghi is not that Europe ignored him. It is that Europe agreed with him and then lost momentum — delivering fastest on the security-tinged measures that were already politically easy, and slowest on the hard structural reforms (energy costs, the single market, capital markets) that the report argued were the whole point. EPIC's next major review lands in September 2026, the report's first anniversary. If the deceleration the Index has already caught continues, the headline will not be how much Europe has done, but how quickly its resolve faded once the applause stopped. Draghi warned that paralysis was becoming untenable. The Index suggests Europe has settled instead for something slower and harder to notice: drift.
