Ursula von der Leyen used today's State of the Union address to call for what she framed as a "pact against gold-plating": simplification, she said, can't run in one direction only. The gross idea is "EU has done its part cutting red tape, now it's member states' turn."
Fair point, and let's be clear: reining in gold-plating is absolutely necessary. It's a real problem in many member states, notably some of the largest, adding real competitiveness costs on top of what EU law actually requires.
But there's more than one motive behind that framing. Blaming national gold-plating is also, conveniently, a way for Brussels to point the finger away from the complexity of the EU rules themselves, and that's not entirely unfair either. The intention is laudable either way. The devil, as usual, is in the details.
Because narrow the margin member states have to interpret a directive tightly enough, and there could be, in some cases, nothing left for them to over-transpose. At that point, you're less looking at a directive, but more at something that behaves like a regulation. Yet 'fewer directives, more regulations' is precisely the approach adopted by the Commission.
Actually there's a counter-intuitive risk it gets even worse: tomorrow's directives, or regulations, simply realign on what gold-plating used to allow at national level, pushed in particular by the largest member states, who'd rather lock in that standard once for the whole Union than keep fighting for it alone at home. And all the more so given the automatic reduction in regulatory competition between Member States it entails. Paradoxically, the competitiveness costs of gold-plating at least today act as a constraint on how far in over-regulating Member States are willing to go.
So: be careful what you wish for. Push the gold-plating crackdown without rethinking the underlying logic, and the boomerang effect is exactly that: heavier, one-size-fits-all approach without room for flexibility.
Originally published on LinkedIn, 16 September 2026.