Nine months ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered the inaugural speech of her second mandate and the European Union changed course. The Green Deal was out. Competitiveness was in.
Several months before, a duo of former Italian prime ministers — Enrico Letta and Mario Draghi — had issued a pair of damning reports on the EU’s single market and competitiveness respectively. Both had signaled the need for a dramatic shift in policy to right the European economic ship.
European industry titans had also been lobbying hard for a plan to stave off economic decline, gathering in the port city of Antwerp to call for a European Industrial Deal. And, of course, U.S. President Donald Trump had just been elected to the White House, adding a sense of urgency to the push to shore up Europe’s economy.
And so the competitiveness Commission was born. This, von der Leyen told the European Parliament, was the goal around which the Commission would focus its work for the next five years.
So, how’s it going? POLITICO has combed last year’s speech for policy promises. Here’s a rundown on how well the Commission has delivered so far.
Competitiveness Compass
What VDL said: “I can announce that the first major initiative of the new Commission will be a Competitiveness Compass. This will frame our work for the rest of the term.”
How it’s going: The Competitiveness Compass was indeed the first initiative of this Commission, although it was presented two weeks later than initially planned due to von der Leyen’s bout of pneumonia in January.
As expected, the compass laid out the Commission’s initiatives for this mandate — from cutting red tape and tackling high energy prices to promising advances on the long-awaited capital markets union — although it lacked any concrete proposals, to the disappointment of businesses. Von der Leyen presented the plan as the Draghi report translated into actionable initiatives. However, barely a third of the report’s proposals have so far become reality, according to an analysis by the European Policy Innovation Council.
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Closing the innovation gap
What VDL said: “We will ensure that our small companies, our startups and scale-ups, can thrive here in Europe.”
How it’s going: It’s clear that it takes more than a year to make up for years of overlooking European startups. The Commission presented a flurry of strategies that gave some insights on how it wants to nurture Europe’s nascent tech companies: One on how it wants to become an artificial intelligence continent, one on quantum computing technology, and one specifically on startups and scale-ups.
But Europe’s tech founders and investors want to see more than just strategies, and the next few months will be decisive. In early 2026, the Commission is expected to present a proposal for a harmonized set of corporate rules, which should help startups to fast-track scaling across the bloc. The road toward that proposal was not flawless, with some Commission tension and industry pushback around the proposal’s legal basis.
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Clean Industrial Deal
What VDL said: “We will put forward the Clean Industrial Deal within the first 100 days of the mandate.”
How it’s going: Before the first 100 days were up, a Clean Industrial Deal emerged. So far, so good. But for the most part, the strategy — a plan to decarbonize the EU’s heavy industry, boost emerging clean technologies and ensure both can compete on the global stage — remains a promise on paper.
The main movement so far has been on the financing side, with the Commission proposing a new state aid framework, a Competitiveness Fund linked to the EU’s long-term budget and a set of tax incentives before the summer. But while the new state aid proposal gives some clear guidelines on how governments can support industrial projects, some believe it isn’t going far enough.
A concrete plan on how the EU intends to stimulate demand for climate-friendly products is expected before the end of the year. Also still to come are detailed measures to ensure critical raw material supply and set up clean trading international partnerships. Crucially, the Commission has also yet to deliver meaningful progress on the most urgent demand from industry: lower energy prices.
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Strategic dialogue on the future of the car industry in Europe
What VDL said: “Together we have to make sure that the future of cars will continue to be made in Europe.”
How it’s going: If strategic dialogues and action plans were all it took to put Europe’s automakers back at the top of the supposed food chain, any competitors would be left in the dust. Von der Leyen followed her State of the Union by launching the strategic dialogue, during which the sector’s chief executives had one objective: obtain leniency on the 2025 emissions targets they had to reach or face fines. Sadly for von der Leyen’s report card, that is the only tangible outcome of the discussions.
The Action Plan for the Automotive Industry made big promises of creating a European battery sector to support the automakers in the transition, along with cutting red tape to allow the carmakers to lead in autonomous driving. Six months later, few of the proposed steps have come to fruition and instead of focusing on cars of the future, the industry is back with more pleas on emissions standards — this time around the 2035 de facto combustion engine ban.
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Reducing energy costs
What VDL said: “We have done a lot to respond to Russia’s energy blackmail and the high inflation that followed. But the price of energy has to go down further.”
How it’s going: Neither gas nor power prices have significantly fallen in the past year — but, realistically, getting prices tumbling that fast was always going to be an impossible task. Still, the EU hasn’t been idle: Brussels has unveiled a wide-spanning blueprint for making energy “affordable” in the coming years.
Meanwhile, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen took observers by surprise when he proposed an outright ban on Russian gas imports by the end of 2027, a bold move that could end the bloc’s reliance on Moscow for good. At the same time, the bloc’s vow of buying billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. gas to placate Trump has drawn skepticism from experts and outrage from climate advocates.
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Free and fair trade; reinforcing economic security
What VDL said: “We know that overdependencies can quickly turn into vulnerabilities … We need free and fair trade to diversify our suppliers [of critical minerals].”
How it’s going: Compared with her first mandate, von der Leyen now has some free-trade wind in her sails — and Trump’s global tariff war is, unexpectedly, helping out. Over the last year, the Commission has gained momentum in its negotiations with mineral-rich countries. For one, it got over the line its mega agreement with the Mercosur countries, a Latin American bloc that includes Brazil and Argentina, which both have vast reserves of lithium and copper. And it’s also patching things up with Australia, a powerhouse of rare earth elements as well as lithium, since the two sides fell out dramatically at the end of 2023.
On the economic security front, legislative work is dwindling slightly — but that’s also because capitals are worried about giving the EU executive too much power over their national turf. Both the title of European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security Maroš Šefčovič as well as the directorate general he’s shepherding got a rebrand this year to officially add the term. And with Brussels set to unveil a new “economic security doctrine” by the end of 2025, we’ll see whether that was a genuine strategy or more of a PR move.
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Critical Medicines Act
What VDL said: “[Health Commissioner] Olivér Várhelyi will lead our work on biotechnologies and his first priority will be the Critical Medicines Act.”
How it’s going: Fairly well. The health commissioner pulled off a pretty big feat by getting the file out the door just within the first 100 days of the new Commission mandate (although his repeated insistence that he’d make that self-imposed deadline means he, rather than von der Leyen, might come away with the credit).
The plan itself hasn’t gone down badly, although the lack of impact assessment on a fairly political file for health — it’s supposed to claw back Europe’s drug production from Asian rivals to shore up the continent’s medicine supply — hasn’t gone down well with members of the European Parliament or countries, which might delay progress.
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Competitive circular economy
What VDL said: “We have paid the price for putting our future in the hands of a single supplier. And we will not make the same mistake again.”
How it’s going: The Commission made repeated pledges that it would prioritize the circular economy, including in the single market strategy, the steel action plan and the Competitiveness Compass — but concrete actions are lacking. The EU executive is eager to increase recycling and reuse of critical raw materials in Europe to reduce its dependency on China, but industry wants more funds and policies to boost recycling capacity and encourage market demand for secondary materials.
The Commission plans to revise labeling rules for certain products and simplify how producers pay for waste collection. An overarching Circular Economy Act is planned for 2026. In the meantime, the EU institutions are in the process of finalizing new rules to increase materials recycling in the automotive sector.
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White paper on the future of European defense
What VDL said: “Our defence spending must increase. We need a single market for defence. We need to strengthen the defence industrial base. We need to improve our military mobility. And we need common European projects on defence.”
How it’s going: Mixed results. Take military mobility. The Commission wants the EU to set aside €17.7 billion for military mobility, according to Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas, which on paper looks like a major win compared with €1.7 billion under the current budget. But it falls well short of the €75 billion or even €100 billion that Tzitzikostas has said is needed.
In March, the Commission presented its €150 billion loans-for-weapons Security Action for Europe regulation, which was quickly adopted in May. But the European Defence Industry Programme, which will allocate €1.5 billion from the EU budget (2025–2027) to strengthen the competitiveness of the European defense industry, remains stuck in interinstitutional negotiations.
The white paper was indeed presented within 100 days and is still being discussed. But a single market for defense remains a utopia in a peace project like the EU, which, since its foundation, has treated defense as a sector set apart from the rest of the economy. To be fair, the Commission is trying, but is meeting resistance from EU countries. The five crises encountered by the EU in the last 15 years — financial, migration, Brexit, Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine — produced very little further integration in the bloc. Defense is no exception.
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A simpler, more focused and more responsive budget
What VDL said: “This will have to be an investment Commission. But our budget is often too complex … We must be much more focused on investing in our priorities.”
How it’s going: Simplification has been one of the selling points of the Commission’s proposal for the EU’s next seven-year budget. It drastically cut down programs in order to make it easier to reshuffle money according to unforeseen needs. It is too early to tell whether this new system will actually make life easier for businesses, regions and farmers spending the EU’s money. But compared with the previous budget, more funding is earmarked for pan-European industrial projects and investments ― which was one of von der Leyen’s key goals.
The power of the regions ― which play a crucial role in EU spending ― was one of the thorniest issues during the budget negotiations inside the Commission. Some regions claim that the proposal expands the power of national capitals at their detriment, while the EU executive claims that nothing will change on this front.
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A European savings and investments union
What VDL said: “We urgently need more private investment. This private capital gap is the main reason we lag behind on overall R&D spending, and thus on innovation.”
How it’s going: It’s too soon to call. Von der Leyen filled the savings and investments union tank with a lot of political gas, giving the decade-old project to deepen and integrate the EU’s capital markets new prominence. The Commission is working on a mass of initiatives, including proposals for simple EU investment accounts for everyday citizens and recommendations for pension reforms to generate a bigger pool of private investment cash in the bloc.
The problem is that the SIU’s success will depend on two factors: whether or not EU citizens care, and decide to start investing rather than keeping their cash stashed in bank accounts; and how much national capitals heed the Commission’s call and reform their national pension, corporate law or tax systems — changes that are in their power, not that of Brussels.
There’s a laundry list of initiatives coming over the next 18 months, so the Commission gets top marks for effort — but the ultimate success of the project will be out of its hands.
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A new omnibus legislation
What VDL said: “We need to streamline our rules to reduce the burden on businesses. And we need to give legal certainty about what we expect from them.”
How it’s going: It’s safe to say that von der Leyen’s red tape-cutting mission is in full swing. At least nine omnibus simplification packages are in the works in Brussels with the aim to roll back regulation on the environment, agriculture, defense, energy and chemicals.
Since presenting a first omnibus in February that cuts back reporting obligations for businesses on their environmental footprint and supply chains, the Commission has been both praised and criticized for its approach. Civil society groups, NGOs and lawmakers have accused the Commission of circumventing the democratic policymaking process by making broad cuts to EU rules behind closed doors. The institution is under investigation for maladministration by the European Ombudsman’s office over its rushed proposal. Hundreds of companies and investors, meanwhile, have said that reopening policies creates more uncertainty, not less.
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Make business easy across Europe
What VDL said: “We need to get back to what the Single Market does best. And make business easy across Europe.”
How it’s going: Former Commission President Jacques Delors once quipped that “nobody can fall in love with the single market.” Fast-forward a few decades and love is in the air. The Draghi report gave a dire diagnosis of the costs associated with interstate barriers to trade — everything from labeling rules to telecom regulations — and a shiny new single market strategy, published in May, shows that this Commission intends to do something about it. Eventually.
In its proposal for the next long-term EU budget, the Commission intends to double the amount of funding for the EU’s combined single market and customs program to €6.2 billion. As EU countries are often the culprits when it comes to internal market barriers, a deeper-pocketed single market policeman might be the answer — or not. A more ambitious attempt at easing barriers to cross-bloc business will come when the Commission puts forward its proposal for a European corporate legal vehicle, known as the 28th regime, to give startups an EU-wide legal status rather than requiring them to navigate 27 different sets of national corporate laws.
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Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture
What VDL said: “We must ensure that our farmers and fishers have a fair and sufficient income.”
How it’s going: One year on, the record is more headlines than hard results. Brussels points to €300 billion in the post-2028 farm budget to subsidize farmer incomes, a bigger emergency fund and promises to send more money to young and small producers. But the overall pot is smaller in real terms and national capitals have wide discretion on how to spend it, raising fears of patchwork rules and weaker green safeguards.
Headline pledges to make farming economically attractive look more like life support, with many farms still reliant on subsidies to stay afloat. The big consensus push to shift money away from land size and toward sustainable diets has barely materialized. Brussels has also floated grand plans for carbon credits, renewable energy and private investment but so far, they remain more vision than reality. All in all, the Commission is seen as tinkering at the edges rather than delivering a breakthrough.
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Pact on Migration and Asylum
What VDL said: “I promised an approach to migration that is both fair and firm. That guarantees sovereignty and solidarity. With stricter rules but also stronger guarantees for individual rights. And we will work on opening up legal pathways.”
How it’s going: Fair. The EU’s migration pact isn’t yet in force, but it’s already been superseded by calls for much harsher migration and border control rules from EU leaders. Von der Leyen has tried to respond with a slew of measures: mega-euro deals with non-EU countries to stop migrants from reaching the bloc; major budget increases for border control agency Frontex; and a push to explore “innovative” solutions to deportations, like the so-called return hubs her Commission has said it wants to set up.
But there is a big gap between ambition and reality, as the European human rights charter limits what governments can do to deport migrants. Meanwhile, one EU country after another has reimposed internal border controls, severely undermining the Schengen free travel zone. Verdict: Europe is definitely harsher on migration under von der Leyen, but not necessarily more fair in any sense of the word.
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Enlarging the EU
What VDL said: “The dream of Europe extends to the Western Balkans, to Ukraine, to Moldova and beyond … We will support these countries every step of the way on their merits-based process until they are ready to join our Union.”
How it’s going: Not great. Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, von der Leyen pledged to bring Ukraine and Moldova into the European Union, arguing that this was the bloc’s best response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression. But two years after both countries received a political green light from the European Council to start accession proceedings, their membership bids are stuck — stopped from advancing due to Hungary’s opposition to Kyiv joining the EU. (Moldova and Ukraine’s membership bids are “coupled” — undoing that pairing is controversial.) The Commission has so far proved unable to bend Hungary’s will.
Meanwhile, applicants from the Western Balkans, some of whose bids date back a decade or more, are growing more and more frustrated with their lack of progress and the apparent preferential treatment for Ukraine and Moldova. Verdict: A for effort, B- for results.
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Aude van den Hove, Pieter Haeck, Zia Weise, Jordyn Dahl, Victor Jack, Camille Gijs, Mari Eccles, Marianne Gros, Jacopo Barigazzi, Gregorio Sorgi, Kathryn Carlson, Jacob Parry, Bartosz Brzeziński and Nick Vinocur contributed to this report.
