“Europe is a commercial, economic, democratic superpower… and it can be a technological superpower,” said the president of the European Investment Bank (EIB), Nadia Calviño, yesterday in Madrid. To achieve this, she added, “we need to address important challenges regarding integration in European markets and the mobilization of private investment.”
The former vice president of the Spanish Government responded to one of the first questions posed by the president of the Elcano Institute, José Juan Ruiz, at the inauguration of the commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the think-tank with the conversation ‘Geoeconomics in times of uncertainty’.
Calviño rejected the notion that Europe suffers from a true technological lag compared to, for example, the United States. “That does not correspond to reality, what I see around me (in Europe) are large innovative technology companies” supported “by a system for start-ups that is just as good as the American one.”
So, where is the difference? In that private investment in the United States is much more agile and enjoys advantages that the EU still does not offer. That is what the European Union must address as soon as possible, according to the president of the EIB. “This year it has become clear that Europe must urgently strengthen its strategic autonomy,” she said, to also achieve the two most immediate objectives of the 27 in these difficult times: strategic autonomy in energy and defense. “We cannot depend on fossil fuels to generate energy, nor on the United States for our defense,” she argued.
In this regard, Calviño outlined the EIB’s initiatives in financing multiple projects. “We are financing the research projects of Indra, we support the Nazca Fund —the only private European fund in the Defense sector, in which the FED also operates— and in 2026 we have several pan-European or transnational projects as objectives” to “contribute to creating that great emblematic European project in the defense sector.”
In the energy sector, the EIB is also currently financing one in every two energy infrastructure projects in Europe; one in every three onshore wind projects and all offshore ones; and one in every five solar plants. Calviño added that she has recently signed a project worth 1.7 billion euros with Red Eléctrica for the Spain-France interconnection.
