Let me start by saying that I am outraged by last night's vile attacks targeting Israeli citizens in Amsterdam. This morning, we have been informed by Prime Minister Schoof of the situation. I strongly condemn these unacceptable acts. Antisemitism has absolutely no place in Europe. And we are determined to fight it and to fight all forms of hatred. We want Jewish life and culture to thrive in Europe.
Let me turn to the informal meeting of the European Council that we had today. First of all, I want to thank you, Prime Minister Orbán, dear Viktor, for the outstanding hospitality and organisation of this informal European Council. Budapest is well known for its history, but also its hospitality. Indeed, I can confirm it is a famous hospitality that we were lucky to experience here. So thank you very much for that.
Then, dear Charles, I also wanted to thank you. Today is your last European Council, and I want to thank you for all your work and dedication over the last five years, for your commitment to making the European project move forward despite the many crises and the heavy storms we went through together; think of the pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine for example, and there were many others. Dear Charles, today we are stronger than we were five years ago, and this is also your success. So thank you very much for these five years.
Last night at dinner, we discussed the results of the elections in the United States. The United States is our biggest economic and trading partner. We share a unique historical bond. And our citizens share millions of friendships across the Atlantic. So it is important to build good relations with the new administration from the very beginning. This is how we will continue to shape a positive transatlantic agenda. I had the opportunity yesterday afternoon to congratulate Donald J. Trump on the phone. We discussed among other things the topics of Ukraine, defence, trade, energy and it was a brief discussion about these topics, but of course I am looking forward to developing these topics together.
Today, our main issue was Europe's competitiveness. And we, first of all, mapped out our strength. For example, compared with our main competitors we have a longer life expectancy; we have an excellent education system that does not rely on the income of the parents; we have the lowest inequality between incomes – so a lot of social aspects; we have the biggest reduction of CO2 emissions; but we also know that we have areas where we have to improve our performance.
And the basis of our discussion was and is the invaluable work of Mario Draghi. A year ago, I asked him if he could produce such a report looking at the competitiveness of the European Union. It was in preparation for the next cycle of the Commission, it was very well received, as you have seen over the last weeks and months since publication, and there is a broad consensus that this is the basis to discuss on and to move forward. What has increased is the urgency to deliver on the topics that are in this report. And it is absolutely impossible to describe it in full shape here but let me shine a light on three priorities.
First, we must close the innovation gap that we have with our global peers. Above all else, it is about diffusing digital innovation throughout our economy. We are very good at groundbreaking research, it is outstanding, but there is a deficiency in bringing the research results into a product and scale up the product on the market in the European Union. There are still a lot of barriers to innovation and innovative start-ups that we see – and that the report sees. The first priority must be to take down those barriers with simplification and speeding up, as a first step, to cut red tape for these start-ups. We have already started to do that but we want to go further. What innovative start-ups tell us is that it is very cumbersome for them to go to the Single Market because they often face 27 different regulations that they have to deal with.
So we want to propose a 28th regime, which says that for these innovative start-ups, a single rule book, a simple and single rule book for the whole of the European Union is accessible. It is voluntary. We have around 182,000 innovative SMEs: So this will give them access to the whole Single Market and give them the possibility to scale up. The goal is indeed to use the full Single Market to scale up. There are many more tracks that we have to work on the Single Market. I will not go in-depth now, but I just want to say that the Letta report is very helpful here, also as a roadmap for the way forward. The Commission will present in June its strategy, drawing on this report and we will look at a better enforcement of the rules. We want to facilitate, mostly and importantly cross-border trade, innovation and investment.
Speaking of investment: As Mario Draghi pointed out, we need more investment, and especially more private capital. It is essential to ramp up also the private capital investment in research and development. So we will work on a European Savings and Investments Union because –it was very impressive today to listen to Christine Lagarde– lots of the savings are not taken forward for valuable investments but are in the bank or in cash. A deep and liquid capital market could leverage the wealth of these private savings.
Second priority: to have a joint plan for competitiveness, decarbonisation and digitalisation. We have shown in the past that we can reduce our emissions while growing our economy. But we know that we have challenges to overcome. So in the first 100 days of the new mandate, we will propose a Clean Industrial Deal. It will build on Mario Draghi's report and on the ten different sector dialogues we have led in the past months to ask the industry with the commitment to 2050 climate-neutrality: What is it that you need to get to this goal? How can we support you in getting there? And the sum of it will be in the Clean Industrial Deal. One major topic in it will be energy. Energy was a big topic today in the discussion too. We know that it was a huge challenge to overcome the energy crisis unleashed by Russia's war in Ukraine, but the energy prices are still structurally too high; they have to go down. And this is one of the tasks for the new Commission that lie ahead of us. We discussed the topics: grids, interconnectors and storage, simpler, faster permitting for renewables will be essential here.
The third and last priority I want to shed a light on is reinforcing our strategic security. We know that overdependencies can quickly turn into vulnerabilities. This is why stable and secure supply chains are needed to power the future of our economy. You all know the topic of critical raw materials: We know that by 2030, for example, at the end of this mandate, demand for some minerals will rise exponentially. So we need action now and coordination at EU level to secure this access.
There are two ways to do this: One way is to diversify, so to have trading partnerships with other regions of the world, so that we are not depending on one single supplier but that we have a diversified chain of supply of critical raw materials. The second way is even more interesting and that is the whole topic of circular economy. If you recycle, you do not need to get new critical raw materials. And if you look at the latest development in the start-ups for recycling, it is fascinating to see how much they can take out of a product that would go to waste normally and take out again these critical raw materials or other valuable resources. We have to follow up on that.
I will stop here. It was a very fruitful discussion about the Draghi report and the roadmap forward. Thank you for your attention.
