Since being elected to the European Parliament in 2019 at the age of 34, Stephane Séjourné has risen rapidly through the ranks of EU institutions.
By 2021, the French politician was leader of the Renew Europe parliamentary group, a post he held until 2024 when he returned to France for a stint as the country’s foreign affairs minister. Then, at the end of last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tapped him to be an executive vice-president in her newly formed Commission.
In his current role as the Commission’s industry czar — or, more formally, the Executive Vice-President for Prosperity and Industrial Strategy — Séjourné is central to the EU’s push to boost competitiveness.
The new buzz word came into common Brussels parlance after Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, delivered a landmark report on the bloc’s lacklustre economy to the Commission last September. Competitiveness is now the driving ethos behind the policy priorities of Von der Leyen’s second mandate.
For Séjourné, “the price of energy is the main factor in the deterioration of our competitiveness at the international and intra-European level,” he told The Parliament in a recent interview.
In 2023, industrial electricity and gas prices in the EU were 158% and 345% higher, respectively, than in the United States, according to think tank Bruegel – a gap exacerbated by Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.
This article is part of The Parliament's latest policy report, "Building a competitive Europe."
The shift to focus on the EU’s competition deficit became official with the launch of the Commission’s so-called Omnibus package, a series of policy proposals to cut red tape for European businesses.
Séjourné said the Commission’s “simplification” drive is a way of rectifying legislative mistakes of the past. “We often thought of regulations in silos and not in a coherent manner sector by sector, profession by profession,” he explained.
But not everyone in Brussels agrees with the push for deregulation. In an op-ed in these pages, Nayla Glaise, president of EU trade union association Eurocadres, described the Commission’s Omnibus package as “reading like a corporate wish list.”
Séjourné — who began his political career as a French Socialist before pivoting to the centre to join President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal party — rejects such characterisations. For him, the simplification agenda goes beyond ideology. “It’s a fairly pragmatic question,” he said.
“Neither the left, nor the right,” he argued, “want a significant part of the time spent by workers at the European level to be producing or in any case solving regulatory problems in companies.”
Competitiveness crunch
The European economy has stagnated in recent years, first due to the Covid-19 pandemic and later as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Now, it faces mounting uncertainty over US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on EU goods, which could rise to 50% at the start of July if the two sides fail to reach a trade deal. The bloc is already contending with a 10% “baseline” tariff on all exports to the US, on top of 50% levies on aluminium and steel and 25% on cars.
The EU economy grew by just 0.3% in the first quarter of this year, according to Eurostat, with the bloc’s largest economies like Germany lagging behind.
More broadly, according to Draghi, EU economic growth “has been persistently slower than in the US over the past two decades,” a development he attributes to lower productivity in the bloc. A key solution to that gap, he argued in his report, is to address the fragmentation of the EU’s single market, “which has a cascading effect on our competitiveness.”
The single market, in theory, offers the bloc’s businesses access to customers across Europe without restrictions. In practice, the 30-year-old project is still incomplete.
EU member states, Séjourné said, have too often put national interests ahead of a shared European agenda, limiting the development of a more integrated internal market. “They gradually abandoned it,” he added.
Séjourné suggested that Trump’s tariffs only make the single market more essential for Europe’s economic growth.
“At a time when the world is becoming more and more protectionist, it is essential for the internal market to become the safe haven for our European companies,” he argued.
To reignite the single market, the Commission recently proposed a new sector-by-sector approach. The strategy is meant to expand access — particularly for small- and medium-sized firms — and increase cross-border selling for industries such as construction, parcel delivery, and installation and repair.
“This will allow member states to find agreements between them more easily, sector by sector rather than in a completely horizontal manner across the entire European economy,” Séjourné explained.
Ultimately, he said, member states themselves must lead the way.
“This is a complex task with the member states,” Séjourné said, “but there is European momentum and there is a growing awareness in Europe that the internal market can be one of the solutions to the trade war for our European companies.”
Buy European
Beyond deepening the single market, Séjourné has called for amending the EU’s public procurement rules to exclude foreign bidders in what he has called a “buy European act.”
“An agreement must be reached at the European level in order to be able to survive economically in a world that, from a geopolitical point of view, is in the process of completely changing with trade flows that are completely disrupted,” he said.
“Buy European,” he argued, "should target the sectors at the heart of the EU’s industrial might: steel, automobiles and chemicals."
“These are the sectors in which we want to keep our production capacities in Europe and where it is absolutely necessary that we can have European preference in purchases,” Séjourné said.
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