The debate on the Single Market in the European Parliament on Monday 21 October provided a foretaste of another debate scheduled for Wednesday in Strasbourg on bureaucracy. As Enrico Letta presented the broad outlines of his report on the Single Market, the political groups picked out the ideas they liked best, and for a majority of them it was the need to reduce the regulatory burden on business.
When Enrico Letta calls on the co-legislators to stop using directives and only regulations,what the members of the EPP, PfE and ECR groups and some members of Renew Europe hear is that the EU needs to regulate less full stop.
“We have to dismantle the whole bureaucracy, we all agree on that. I am delighted to see that Mr Letta agrees with Mr Draghi on this idea. We must now wait for the Commission to deliver results in this area”, said Andreas Schwab (EPP, German).
And his colleague Svenja Hahn (Renew Europe, German) agrees: “We need a radical reduction in bureaucracy. We need to slim down the new European laws and keep growth as our objective”.
Similarly, when Mr Letta insists on the importance of the Green Deal for the coming years, the EPP, the PfE and the ECR believe that it is one of the factors behind the EU’s lack of competitiveness.
In the S&D, Greens/EFA and The Left groups, on the other hand, MEPs stressed the need to maintain social gains and climate policies in order to be more competitive. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)