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ECB’s Lagarde: “Europe Is Resilient, but It Is Also Vulnerable”

29 October 2025

ECB’s Lagarde: “Europe Is Resilient, but It Is Also Vulnerable”
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, at the ECB Conference on The transformative power of AI: economic implications and challenges, in Frankfurt on April 1, 2025. Photo by the ECB under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde on Wednesday urged greater creativity and decisiveness in strengthening Europe’s governance, saying that the continent’s resilience must now be matched by the capacity to act.

Speaking at an official dinner of the Banca d’Italia during the ECB’s external Governing Council meeting in Florence, Italy, Lagarde compared Europe’s evolution to the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome, which, she said, “offers inspiration for Europe today.”

“Europe is resilient, but it is also vulnerable,” she said. “We have an open economic model that exposes us to global shocks. Yet we seem unable to reduce that vulnerability by fixing our internal market and strengthening our domestic growth.”

She said Europe’s governance had become “too slow, too complex and too much of a hostage to individual member states wielding vetoes.”

“The solution does not require revolutionary change,” Lagarde said. “Brunelleschi did not invent new materials – he took the bricks, mortar and iron of his time, and combined them in ways that had never been imagined. Europe can do the same.”