Remarks by President António Costa at the doorstep ahead of the informal EU leaders' retreat of 12 February 2026 10:35 Before the start of the informal EU leaders' retreat of[...]

Welcome to Alden Biesen for this Leaders' retreat with the participation of Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta. Today, our retreat is on competitiveness. We have a clear priority -- to strengthen economic growth in Europe. This is essential for our prosperity, to create quality jobs, and to sustain our economic social model.

Four main priorities.
First of all, we need to deepen and complete our single market. We need to remove internal barriers and also bureaucratic barriers.

Second priority, we need to scale up our companies. For this, we need to have one vibrant capital markets to support our SMEs and our startups, to scale up, to invest in innovation and to modernise our economy. We need also to scale up our big companies, because we need to have strong companies to compete in the global market.

Third priority, in this geoeconomic context, we need to continue our very proactive trade policy and protect our companies from unfair competition, from economic coercion, and to allow them to continue to work and to tackle the issue of the energy costs.

And finally, we need to invest more and better. Of course, public and private investment. About public investment, we will have the opportunity to discuss this later this year, around the next multi-annual budget for the European Union. Today, our priority is to unlock private investment, mobilise our savings to invest in our companies and to create a more dynamic, and vibrant ecosystem for investment.