Draghi: on tariffs the EU can negotiate with Trump but with one voice

Draghi then warned that Europe must learn from its mistakes so as not to repeat them. One of these, cited as an example by the ex-premier, is solar panels, a market that Europe has now lost because it is now dominated by China.

What was the mistake? Europe on solar panels subsidised demand, introduced incentives to stimulate purchases, Draghi explained. While China was putting all kinds of subsidies and incentives on solar panel production in its domestic market, Europe was acting on demand. What happened? That the subsidies on European demand helped the Chinese producers, who were already being assisted by their state: that was how Europe lost this market. Well for Draghi it is important that Europe does not repeat the same mistake in the future: 'Subsidies should be given to production, to the residents of Europe,' he said emphatically.

Asked how and where to direct European industrial policy, at a time of multiple challenges, Draghi explained that in the past industrial policy aimed at creating champion companies (failing badly as happened for example with Ilva or Gioia Tauro). "Now industrial policy focuses on sectors," he said, such as high tech and space. And in this respect, Draghi mentioned the successes of Elon Musk. And he did so not to contribute to the heated debate on the comments about the Italian judges of the tycoon who will soon become head of the Trump administration's department for unbureaucratisation, but to point out that 'Musk was not born in the desert'. If Musk and his companies are a colossus in the fields of technological innovation and space, it is because 'many years ago US industrial policy planning led to this'. And Europe will have to do the same in new fields of development, such as data management: industrial policy must focus on the development of the key sectors of the future.

There was no shortage of questions from the admen, summarised by the host Josef Nierling, CEO of Porsche consulting, on how Europe will be able to finance the great challenges of the future, from defence to climate change, from digitalisation to artificial intelligence. A few hours earlier, Draghi had spoken - behind closed doors - about the need to speed up the implementation of the Capital Market Union in front of an audience at the World Business Forum in Milan (a two-day event dedicated to the business community at Mico, the Milan Trade Fair). At the Porsche Consulting event, the former Prime Minister and former ECB president explained that in the US start-up companies have a better chance of becoming big because they find the first financiers who then, like a financial springboard, allow them to access the capital markets: in Europe, he said, this 'scale-up' is more difficult. And then he clarified, with regard to his report on competitiveness, that he was not 'in favour of gigantism', as some commentators have claimed. But in Europe 'we are small', he remarked, and these dimensions of ours no longer work, they are no longer in step with the times, because all around us, in the US and China, the giants are thriving. As if to say that to compete with the giants you have to be just as giant.

CEOs, entrepreneurs, directors listened in religious silence to Draghi's words and advice. But then, with bitterness, they commented at the end of the meeting that Mario Draghi's action plans, outlined in his report on competitiveness and in his speeches, could only be realised and implemented by politicians and politics. In Brussels and in the big European political power centres, in Rome, in Berlin, in Paris. And in this the entrepreneurial class could not hide its sense of bewilderment, not hope.