22 June 2026 – The European Council promises relief – and delivers the opposite. What is being sold as a competitiveness agenda is, in truth, a revenue machine for Brussels at the expense of those who hold Europe’s economy together.
Competitiveness Rhetoric Meets Budget Reality
Cutting bureaucracy, affordable energy, industrial renewal – the European Council is naming the right problems. But political reality follows a different logic: the answers from last week’s Council meeting are once again aimed only at large industrial players with access to funding programs, energy support, ETS adjustments, and political working groups.
Small and medium-sized enterprises – which procure materials, import, store, process, and reliably supply customers every day – receive not relief, but new obligations: CBAM, steel quotas, reporting duties, customs risks, proof-of-origin requirements, rising compliance costs. In Brussels, SMEs appear far too rarely as drivers of competitiveness – and far too often as targets of new regulation.
The Real Logic: Brussels Needs Money
The dispute over the next EU budget reveals the fundamental problem. The Union needs money – for defence, transformation, Ukraine, industrial policy, and new programs. That is why instruments such as ETS and CBAM are no longer treated merely as climate or trade policy, but increasingly as sources of revenue.
This fundamentally changes the political logic. Anyone who uses regulation to finance the budget has a structural interest in maintaining, expanding, and securing that regulation. Simplification remains the headline – the revenue logic determines everyday reality.
Large companies can absorb this: compliance departments, consultants, funding offices, lobbying access. SMEs must comply with the same rules – with a fraction of the resources.
No Longer a Warning Signal – Visible Loss of Substance
The consequences of this policy are no longer visible only in strategy papers. In the German metal and electrical industry alone, 15,600 jobs were lost in April 2026 on a seasonally adjusted basis. Compared with 2019, almost 320,000 jobs are missing.
Even more critical is the collapse in investment. When companies stop investing in machinery, productivity, and modernization, Europe loses more than jobs. It loses industrial know-how, delivery capability, and market breadth – substance that cannot be bought back through funding programs.
A Revenue Machine with a Competitiveness Label
Real competition does not emerge from funds, protection mechanisms, and new sources of revenue. It emerges from open markets, many suppliers, predictable costs, affordable energy, and low bureaucratic hurdles.
If CBAM, ETS, steel quotas, and new EU own resources ultimately serve mainly to stabilize the Brussels budget while pushing smaller market participants out of competition, then this is not a competitiveness agenda. It is a planned-economy burden agenda with an industrial-policy label.
SMEs do not need more speeches about competitiveness from Brussels. They need freedom to act, international supply chains without bureaucratic barriers, and rules that not only corporations can survive. Anyone who leaves SMEs on their own does not lose a few individual businesses – they lose precisely the competition that Europe claims it wants to strengthen.
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