The CEOE sets out its key priorities for the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU in the second half of 2023

The three main business priorities identified in this report are: sustainability, digitalisation and global competitiveness.

Prepared within the framework of the CEOE’s European Union Committee, the report sets out a clear defence of the EU as the natural environment in which Spanish companies operate. Moreover, it stresses the importance of the responses that must be mounted to many of the challenges of today having a strong European component and being guided by the principle of public-private collaboration.

Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine has demonstrated that the European Union’s principles and values, which including freedom of enterprise, can neither be taken for granted and defending them is not without cost. Costs that exacerbate inflationary tensions, soaring energy prices and disruptions to global supply chains, resulting in an erosion of business margins.

Against this backdrop, the report is structured around three overall objectives:

• Firstly, sustainability, understood to mean the ability to implement public policies that, besides tending towards the decarbonisation and circularity of the economy, offer sufficient incentives to promote investment, growth and employment. To do this, dialogue and cooperation with the private sector is crucial.
• Moreover, the main thrusts are: to make economic policy higher profile; to make decarbonisation and circularity of the economy the drivers of increasing industrial competitiveness; to ensure that “More Social Europe” is synonymous with more enterprise; and to complete the European internal market according to the principles of better regulation.
• Secondly, to consolidate a digital single market capable of competing globally. To do this, the CEOE proposes that, among other points, the regulatory agenda be sufficiently flexible and balanced to generate a competitive business ecosystem based on conditions of fair competition for all operators.
• Thirdly and finally, the European Union’s global competitiveness. If having a strategy to boost the economy is key to fulfilling the aims sustainable development, strategic autonomy and digitalisation, it is still more important to strengthen both the EU’s economic weight internationally and its coercive capacity. Especially in a context marked by the brutality of the war in Ukraine and the pressure this puts on the multilateral trading system. For this reason, the CEOE advocates returning trade policy to its origins, committing not only to reciprocity in relations with out main partners, but also in opening markets. The priorities laid out therefore include the need to progress the negotiation of trade agreements and to ratify those already concluded, paying special attention to Latin America and deepening the transatlantic agenda.

As the President of CEOE’s European Union Commission, Jesús Ortiz, stated, the purpose of this projection and anticipation exercise, held just over a year before what will be the fifth Spanish Presidency of the Council, is to offer the government, in a proactive and constructive spirit, a clear and comprehensive guide to Spanish companies’ priorities around a broad range of matters affecting the various industrial and business sectors.

Link to the priorities document