The adoption of the Roadmap One Europe, One Market on 23 April 2026 marked a significant step in the European competitiveness agenda, translating into a shared work programme by the Parliament, the Council and the Commission the diagnosis developed in the Letta and Draghi reports. Structured around five pillars, the Roadmap unfolds within a European debate too often absorbed by the emergency of the moment: its significance lies precisely in placing medium-term reforms on the same footing as the response to crises.

The core issue addressed by the paper concerns the political resilience of this commitment: the risk is that the decision-making bottleneck already identified in the reports may resurface in the implementation phase.

This contribution offers a political-institutional reading of the Roadmap and identifies three priorities: reinforcing its political weight, keeping the focus on barriers to European scale, and building a public dimension recognisable beyond Brussels.

One Europe, One Market cannot be reduced to a slogan: it must become the instrument through which Europe ceases to regard the Single Market as a completed project and begins instead to treat it as the strategic asset on which everything else depends. The Union cannot afford another agenda that is sound in diagnosis but weak in implementation