German Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaks in the Bundestag during his government statement on the EU summit. Parliament deals with pension laws and the Military Service Modernization Act. Michael Kappeler/dpa
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Thursday called for wide-ranging economic reforms to make the European Union more competitive, proposing a European stock exchange to finance homegrown companies.
“Europe will only become more productive if it changes fundamentally,” Merz said in the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, ahead of an EU leaders summit in Brussels next week.
This means an end to regulatory frenzy, faster procedures, open markets and more innovation, he argued.
Merz emphasized that the proposed reforms do not contradict Germany’s commitment to achieving its target of climate neutrality by 2045. The EU is aiming for 2050.
But he said the targets should be achieved “not just with regulation and certainly not with bans, but with open technology, with innovation, with competitiveness, especially in technologies that make environmental protection possible in the first place.”
Merz also called for the growth potential of the European single market to be better utilized.
For example, companies need a sufficiently broad and deep European capital market in order to be able to finance themselves better and faster, he argued.
“We need a kind of European Stock Exchange so that successful companies such as BioNTech from Germany don’t have to go to the New York Stock Exchange,” Merz said.
BioNTech, founded in 2008, became a publicly traded company in New York in 2019. It later developed one of the earliest vaccines against the coronavirus.