STRASBOURG — EU countries must follow Brussels’ lead and slash red tape to help European businesses, Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday. 

“Companies tell us they spend almost as much on bureaucracy as on research and development; this cannot be,” the European Commission president said in an address to the European Parliament.

Since the beginning of this mandate, the European Commission has pushed a deregulation agenda in response to appeals from member states to reduce administrative burdens and support businesses facing economic troubles.

Ahead of a Thursday EU leaders’ retreat on competitiveness, von der Leyen said member states need to get their own houses in order.

“We must also look at the national level, there is too much gold-plating — the extra layers of national legislation that just make businesses’ lives harder and create new barriers in our single market,” she said. 

Ahead of the leaders’ summit, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz published a paper blaming Brussels’ regulation for Europe’s economic malaise. 

But von der Leyen argued that countries are also to blame: “If we are serious about simplification, we must crack down on gold-plating and fragmentation. It is time for a deep regulatory housecleaning, at all levels.”

She gave the example of discrepant weight limits for trucks in France and Belgium — two neighboring countries — which makes transport more complicated.

“We proposed legislation to harmonise this. Almost two years later, it is still under discussion,” she said, while also pointing out that many simplification bills in Brussels are still stuck in negotiations between EU countries and the European Parliament. 

Von der Leyen also pointed out that it is very difficult to send waste from one EU country to another, as it can take months for traders to get the go-ahead from authorities, depending on different national rules.

Amidst transatlantic tensions between Washington and Brussels over social media regulations and tariffs on industrial goods, von der Leyen lamented that the EU has three times more trade barriers than in the U.S. “How can we compete on an equal footing? We have the second-largest economy in the world, but we are driving it with the handbrake on.”

She said she will put forward a competitiveness “roadmap” to complete the EU single market by 2028, to be approved by EU leaders at a summit on competitiveness scheduled for March. This roadmap will contain commitments to adopt some proposals by the end of 2027. 

“Time is of the essence,” she said, “we need everyone to play their part.”