Patriots for Europe Refuses to Endorse a Roadmap That Deepens Centralisation And Ignores The Real Causes of Europe's Industrial Decline
Strasbourg, 28/04/2026 - The Patriots for Europe Group rejects the interinstitutional declaration on the "One Europe, One Market Roadmap" in its current form. Behind the marketing language of competitiveness lies yet another exercise in Brussels centralisation: a roadmap that promises everything and delivers more of the same. More regulation dressed as "simplification", more federalist overreach dressed as "integration", and more strategic dependencies dressed as "strong trade".
Declarations do not lower energy bills, do not bring back industrial jobs, and do not restore Europe's competitiveness. Real action does. Yet the Roadmap doubles down on the very policies that have crippled European industry. It protects the ETS framework that is strangling our manufacturers, locks Member States into the Mercosur agreement that will devastate European farmers and food sovereignty, and imposes a Digital Euro that paves the way for unprecedented financial surveillance of citizens. It even commits to a "Cloud and AI Development Act" and "AI Gigafactories" while Europe falls further behind the United States and China, because no Brussels regulation can substitute for the affordable energy and regulatory freedom our companies are being denied.
The Patriots for Europe Group has consistently supported eliminating unjustified administrative burdens and restoring competitiveness. But we will not support declarations that, under the pretext of a "more integrated Single Market", expand the Commission's centralised control over Member States, override national economic strategies, and accelerate the federalist drift the European peoples have repeatedly rejected.
Europe needs a genuine competitiveness turnaround: affordable energy, a real cut to bureaucracy, regulatory flexibility, protection of strategic sectors, and respect for the sovereign economic choices of Member States. Not a quarterly stocktaking ritual that entrenches the same failed model.
The Patriots for Europe Group also regrets that the European People's Party, as the largest political group in the European Parliament and the political family of the President of the European Commission, failed to fully recognize these challenges and focuses on issuing statements rather than addressing the root causes of the competitiveness crisis it has helped to shape.