Draghi accepts 2026 Charlemagne Prize with stark Europe warning: 'we are truly alone together'

Mario Draghi, the 78-year-old former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister, received the 2026 International Charlemagne Prize on Thursday in the Krönungssaal of Aachen's town hall, the prize honouring his role in stabilising the eurozone during the 2012 debt crisis and his 2024 report on European competitiveness.

Accepting the award, Draghi delivered an unsparing warning. "For the first time in living memory, we are truly alone together," he said, arguing that the United States had become "more adversarial and unpredictable" and "may no longer guarantee our security". He told the audience — which included Chancellor Friedrich Merz, his ECB successor Christine Lagarde, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis — that "every strategic dependence must now be re-examined" and that "if openness remains our only answer, it becomes the absence of a decision". Artificial intelligence, defence and energy infrastructure, he said, were the areas where Europe had to rapidly scale up investment; the annual price tag attached to his recommendations has since risen from the €800 billion of the 2024 Draghi Report to €1.2 trillion.

Draghi spent much of the speech on the EU's procedural failure. "Agreements are processed in committees that water them down and delay them until the outcome bears little resemblance to what was intended," he said. "The result is measures that fall so far short of the scale of the challenges that they are worse than inaction." Weak delivery, he added, "erodes legitimacy, and weak legitimacy makes delivery harder still. We must break that cycle." His solution was a coalition of the willing: "Countries that feel the burden of this moment most strongly and understand that the window of action will not remain open forever must have the freedom to lead."

In his laudatio, Merz returned repeatedly to the 2012 "whatever it takes" pledge that calmed sovereign-bond markets at the height of the Greek crisis. "You stabilised the euro and the eurozone with means that were not uncontested. It could have failed. But it succeeded," the chancellor said, calling the single currency today "unangefochten" — uncontested. He shared Draghi's diagnosis of Europe's geopolitical weakness, arguing that the long-held belief that a 450-million-consumer single market would, on its own, translate into political power had "proven to be an illusion". "Europe has set out to become a power. A power that can withstand the storms of this new age," he said.

Merz then turned the laudatio into a pointed critique of the European Commission's draft Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028-2034, which would expand the budget to roughly €1.76 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms. The current structure, he said, was "planwirtschaftlich" — centrally planned seven years in advance — and still routes "more than two-thirds" of EU funding into redistribution and subsidies. A modernised budget had to be leaner, focused on competitiveness, defence and economic sovereignty. He firmly rejected new joint EU debt: "Germany cannot follow that road for constitutional reasons alone," pointing out that "enough countries today already spend more on interest than on defence" because of accumulated borrowing.

Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis, the ceremony's second laudator, used his remarks to vindicate the Draghi bet on Greek reform. Many in the eurozone crisis, he said, had insisted Greece was un-reformable; "others, Mr Draghi among them, took a different view, and today it stands clear that the trust placed in Greece was justified."

The prize itself, awarded almost every year since 1950 by the city of Aachen, where Charlemagne ruled, has previously gone to Winston Churchill, Helmut Kohl, Bill Clinton, Angela Merkel, popes John Paul II and Francis, and — in 2023 — to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. Draghi himself, a Rome-born economist whose career runs from professor in Italy through the World Bank and Goldman Sachs to the Banca d'Italia governorship (2006-2011), the ECB presidency (2011-2019) and a 20-month Italian premiership in 2021-2022, presented the 2024 Draghi Report on European competitiveness with 383 recommendations. "You took charge of the euro during a time of crisis," Merz joked at one point, citing the "Super Mario" nickname that journalists and traders gave him in 2012. "I think you'll understand why his friends call him Super Mario."