If von der Leyen truly really wants to make the bloc more competitive — as outlined in the recent report from former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi — then she needs to empower European companies to excel on the global stage rather than just pick winners among the bloc’s legacy industrial giants.
Luckily, her new Commission has the building blocks to make this happen.
By choosing Finland’s Henna Virkkunen — a long-serving member of the European Parliament with expertise on Europe’s digital priorities — as the Commission’s executive executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, von der Leyen has made it clear she wants the bloc to globally compete on digital issues.
As a member of the so-called D9 Group of like-minded EU member countries that favor innovation over protectionism, Finland is the poster child for a more dynamic version of Europe’s digital agenda. The country currently has the highest number of cloud computing services among EU members — a mainstay for future economic growth — and has doubled down on publicly owned high performance computing, which is a requisite to create next-generation AI systems.
This should be a model for the rest of Europe.
Yet, Virkkunen will be working closely with France’s Stéphane Séjourné, who is now responsible for the Commission’s prosperity and industrial strategy. As a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron — who strongly advocates a “tech sovereignty” agenda that promotes Gallic interests above those of the wider bloc — Séjourné is expected to continue pushing for strong industrial policy that often flirts with protectionism.
Von der Leyen must reject any version of “tech sovereignty” that siloes Europe’s economy from the wider world. She should empower her new Commission — most notably via Virkunnen and Séjourné — to set aside protectionist rhetoric and deliver on the promises of digital growth for the next five years.
By grasping control over the levers of power in Brussels, von der Leyen has shown she can act decisively. Now, she needs to turn those ambitions toward making the EU a global-facing innovation powerhouse, which it truly has the chance to be.