| Sometime next month, former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi—“the guy who saved the euro”—will publish his much-anticipated report on the competitiveness of the European economy. The report’s release, originally supposed to take place before the European elections earlier this month, is widely suspected of having been postponed for fear that it would amplify populist right-wing parties’ narratives about the EU’s alleged propensity to waste public funds. Populist politicians were especially enraged by Draghi’s suggestion in February this year that the EU must find an “enormous amount” of money, equating to roughly €500 billion per year, to finance the green and digital transitions—one-third of which, Draghi said, should come from the public sector. “This is a huge amount of money that cannot possibly be borne by European taxpayers,” Jean-Paul Garraud, an MEP for the French far-right Rassemblement national, said in April. “Citizens have the right to know what [the report] contains in order to vote in full knowledge of the facts.” Philipp Lausberg, an analyst at the European Policy Centre, stressed that, aside from Draghi’s specific policy proposals, the topic of “competitiveness” is inherently highly contentious. “Deciding which industries to support and which not—I think this is very much what this report is really about,” Lausberg told Euractiv. “And that will create winners and losers. And that will also create lobbies for and against what he says.” Despite the controversial nature of the report, the view that competitiveness should be a core focus of EU policymaking over the coming years is almost entirely uncontested among EU policymakers. This is corroborated by the fact that Hungary, which takes over the rotating EU Council presidency from Belgium on 1 July, has announced that it will continue its predecessor’s policy of making competitiveness a key part of its agenda. Among professional economists, however, policymakers’ emphasis on competitiveness is far from uncontroversial—if anything, there is a consensus that they shouldn’t focus on it at all. | 
