Mario Draghi spent 2024 writing a report that diagnosed exactly what was wrong with European competitiveness, more than 170 proposed interventions spanning energy, industry, defense, digital infrastructure, capital markets and productivity. None of it became policy. Now Draghi, together with Stripe co-founder and chief executive Patrick Collison, is launching a new organization built to close that gap between diagnosis and action, called the Rhine Group.
The group describes its own purpose bluntly, to take the competitiveness report Draghi delivered to the European Commission and turn it into a concrete reform agenda rather than a document governments file away. Its guiding line is just as blunt, decline is not inevitable, but it is the direction Europe has taken unless it acts with urgency. The group is careful to describe itself as a discussion forum rather than a rival to the Commission or to national governments, legally based in Geneva and run day to day by Luis Garicano, the Spanish economist and former member of the European Parliament.
What gives the Rhine Group its weight is less its legal structure than who signed on. The membership list mixes European business figures such as Xavier Niel of Iliad and the former French finance minister Bruno Le Maire with academics including the Nobel laureate economist Philippe Aghion, and reaches beyond Europe to Shopify's Tobi Lutke.