Sliding doors: The EU that could’ve been with Draghi in charge

You may have seen it on LinkedIn or in the headlines: Mario Draghi has spoken again.

This is, after all, Super Mario’s superpower — when he speaks, people listen, reinforcing his reputation for delivering words that matter.

Last week, his remarks at a popular Italian forum in Rimini were especially sharp toward the European Union’s current trajectory. And that’s why his latest intervention is more than just another speech.

The timing is notable, too. Ursula von der Leyen, barely a year into her second mandate as European Commission president, is already facing criticism.

Few in Brussels have forgotten that Draghi was once floated as a potential alternative for the role—despite never officially entering the race.

Yet the former European Central Bank governor, previously nicknamed ‘wizard’ for spell-like phrases such as “whatever it takes”, still casts a long shadow over the Commission.

For von der Leyen, his presence lingers almost like a ghost haunting her second term. And the question remains: what if Draghi had taken her place?

Much like the film ‘Sliding Doors’ (or, for cinephiles, its artistic predecessor ‘La double vie de Véronique’), the EU might have unfolded along two different timelines.

Drawing on Draghi’s recent speech and his over-cited report, one can imagine an alternate Commission presidency under his leadership...

Geopolitical Europe (for real)

Brussels has been promising a more assertive EU role on the world stage for a decade—Jean-Claude Juncker called his a “political Commission”, von der Leyen branded her first mandate “geopolitical”.

Draghi’s verdict? That's still wishful thinking. He pointed to Ukraine as the clearest example: Europe has paid the biggest bills and has the greatest stake in a just peace, but “so far played only a fairly marginal role in peace negotiations,” Draghi said.

On the Middle East, he accused the EU of being “a spectator as Iran’s nuclear sites were bombed and the massacre in Gaza intensified” (notice the word choice on Gaza: von der Leyen has never gone further than “catastrophic humanitarian situation”).

His warning is that the idea that economics alone buys geopolitical power is dead. Europe needs to stop being a “supporting actor” and turn into a protagonist — which, in Draghi-speak, means rewiring the EU’s political machinery.

Sliding doors: With Draghi at the helm, we would’ve expected a louder EU on global crises (leveraging his stature to elevate Europe’s voice). But also, there would’ve been bigger fights inside the bloc, with countries allergic to deeper political integration.

US tariffs and a new trade order

Draghi’s sharpest words were saved for trade, though, and for the von der Leyen-Trump summit in Scotland. “We had to resign ourselves to the tariffs imposed by our largest trading partner and long-standing ally,” he said.

That's Draghi’s judgment more than a clear statement of what he would have done differently—after all, trade negotiations rest heavily on member states’ opinions.

Still, it's hard to imagine Draghi flying to Trump’s golf course and publicly endorsing the US narrative of imbalance, as von der Leyen did. At the time, she acknowledged “a surplus on our side and a deficit on the US side”, a statement that paved the way for the asymmetric 15% tariff arrangement between Brussels and Washington.

The contrast extends beyond the deal with Trump, as Von der Leyen still plays by the rulebook on trade.

In an op-ed (that looked responding partly to Draghi’s speech) last week, she argued that trade partnerships would help “work on shared global challenges, including the modernisation of the rules-based trading system.”

Draghi, by contrast, sounded more pessimistic: EU leaders, he said, “must design a trade policy suited to a world that is abandoning multilateral rules.”

Sliding doors: A Draghi-led Commission might have taken a tougher line in transatlantic trade talks—risking clashes similar to Canada’s and China’s with the US—and embraced a more controversial trade policy, potentially moving away from WTO-style multilateralism.

Competitiveness turned upside down

Draghi still hovers in Brussels not just as the ghost of the road not taken but also as the author of the competitiveness report that von der Leyen herself commissioned.

The divergence on competitiveness between the two is remarkable: for von der Leyen, it can be achieved largely within existing frameworks, while for Draghi, Europe must first acknowledge that the global context in which it once prospered has disappeared.

In Rimini, Draghi laid it out bluntly: “Where once markets were relied upon to guide the economy, today there are sweeping industrial policies. Where once there was respect for rules, now there is the use of military force and economic power to protect national interests.”

And Europe, the former Italian prime minister argued, is “ill-equipped” for this new reality unless it rewires its political and economic machinery.

In practical terms, von der Leyen’s vision translates to still placing her bet on the private sector to deliver competitiveness, for instance.

Draghi disagrees: the European businesses have already adapted, while the laggard is the public sector. Governments, in his view, need to step up, define priority industries, and, crucially, agree on how to pay for the “massive investments” that will be required.

Sliding doors: A Draghi EU executive would have leaned hard on governments (rather than relying solely on the EU budget) to bankroll a competitiveness reboot. Less market liberalism, more industrial policy — and a much tougher ask for EU capitals.

Internal market completion, not just simplification

Von der Leyen loves to talk about red tape as the main impediment to Europe’s competitiveness. Her second mandate has already churned out ‘omnibus packages’ aimed at stripping back EU rules and streamlining the bureaucracy.

Draghi, however, sees the problem differently. In Rimini, he bemoaned “slower procurement, higher costs” and “obstacles we impose on ourselves”, but he didn’t call for deregulation.

His message: stop tinkering and finish the job, calling for the completion of the bloc’s internal market.

“The Single Market Act was passed almost forty years ago, and yet significant obstacles to trade within Europe remain. Removing them would have a substantial impact on Europe’s growth,” Draghi said.

Translation: Europe’s problem isn’t too many rules, it’s that the single market is still half-built.

He also urged the EU to experiment with new forms of integration, such as a “28th regime” akin to creating a “European Delaware” for business registration.

Think of it as an optional pan-EU corporate framework to cut fragmentation and give companies a real continental home. Brussels has nodded to the idea, and von der Leyen even name-checked it in her political guidelines, but it’s still stuck in the “under consideration” pile.

Sliding doors: Draghi would have made single market completion a flagship project from day one — putting stalled dossiers front and centre instead of dismantling existing rules under the banner of simplification.

A European defence for Europeans

One area where Draghi and von der Leyen converge is on the need to strengthen Europe’s defence.

Both want more spending. But Draghi’s framing hits harder.

The core line in his speech is that “economic strength is a necessary but not sufficient condition for geopolitical strength”, saying that the illusion that Europe’s economic power alone could translate into leverage on the global scene has “evaporated”.

Defence, he hinted, is what really matters.

And while von der Leyen talks about more money for Europe’s armies, Draghi warns today’s push is less about Europe’s strategic vision than America’s pressure.

“We were also pushed by that same ally to increase military spending — a decision we perhaps should have made anyway, though in forms and ways that would likely have reflected Europe’s own interest more faithfully,” he said.

Sliding doors: Under Draghi, the EU might have pursued a stronger doctrine of strategic autonomy in defence too, moving closer to Emmanuel Macron’s vision of Europe decoupling from reliance on the US.