Daniel Fernández
SURPRISE, SURPRISE: “Competitiveness” isn’t winning hearts and minds across Europe. A new study by Spanish consultancy LLYC on the Commission’s communications strategy warns that Brussels’ push to anchor its narrative in competitiveness and simplification — two words beloved in the Berlaymont but barely understood outside it — risks misjudging the public mood.
The caveats: The study, shared with Playbook, acknowledges the EU doesn’t serve one public, but 27-plus micro-constituencies with different media diets, political cultures and levels of interest in Brussels. Any institution trying to speak to all of them at once is, by definition, doing a difficult job. It also credits Ursula von der Leyen with achieving a Commission with a “unified and recognizable voice.”
But cohesion has a cost: Since 2024, the Commission has oriented its narrative around the concept of competitiveness, a technocratic frame that risks narrowing the institution’s ability to reach a public increasingly animated by questions of democracy and values, according to Luisa Garcia, partner and CEO of corporate affairs at LLYC. “The Commission’s effort to engage with citizens risks falling flat if competitiveness is not linked with more tangible, everyday concerns,” she said.
A misalignment problem: Slides shared exclusively with POLITICO show a clear mismatch between the policy messages that the Commission pushes and what the public tends to engage with. For example, LLYC found that the Commission publishes more content on energy than digital policy when internet users are more likely to respond to the latter.
It’s not a popularity contest: “Commission policy priorities may not always meet the public’s interests — still they are in the interest of the public,” Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho told Playbook. “Good to hear that on digital our priority and the public’s interest converge … But the communication challenge is to trigger public interest for all types of priorities.”
