EU pushes anti-gold-plating pact as Poland tops list of over-regulation

In a State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen called on EU governments to adopt a pact that would require justification for any national measures exceeding EU directives, aiming to eliminate “gold-plating”. Poland’s recent deregulation drive, launched by InPost founder Rafał Brzoska and supported by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, produced a report listing a hundred examples of excessive national rules across sectors, a key reason for Poland’s bottom ranking in the Fraser Institute’s economic-freedom survey.

The pact is slated for discussion at an October summit with a target signing before year-end, though the summit only urged the Commission to propose further anti-gold-plating actions. Meanwhile, former Soviet republics Georgia and Armenia rank ahead of most EU post-communist members in economic freedom, prompting questions about how future accession might affect their regulatory environments. The EU is also moving toward “omnibus” packages and favoring directly applicable regulations to reduce the space for national embellishments. Slovakia has already introduced a bill-level comparison table to flag any gold-plating, a model other Central European states could emulate.