In Brussels, there's nothing new - apart from the acceleration.
On 3 February 2026, the German daily Die Welt reveals a study of industrial organisation Gesamtmetall in 2025, the European Commission has introduced 1 456 legislative acts, a record since 2010. Twenty-one directives, 102 regulations, 137 delegated acts and 1,196 implementing acts. Four new texts per day.
Source : Die Welt (D), 3 February 2026, Gesamtmetall study obtained by Welt am Sonntag.
Even though’Ursula von der Leyen promised an «unprecedented» reduction in bureaucracy.
A suffocating inflation of standards
According to Stefan Zander (Gesamtmetall), «many companies are already struggling to keep pace». Even though German industry is well versed in European requirements, it is sounding the alarm.
The problem is not just volume. It's the nature of the instruments used.
The delegated acts, which allow the Commission to complete legislation with broad technical autonomy, largely escape direct democratic control. The former European Commissioner Günter Verheugen speaks of ’a grey area«:
«Bureaucrats get together and decide things that affect the lives of millions of people and thousands of businesses.»
In other words, the standard is advancing without any real political debate.
And what about Switzerland?
The Confederation is now being asked to take up this right dynamically in order to «stabilise» the bilateral relationship. In concrete terms, this means importing a body of legislation that even German industry has denounced as excessive.
But Switzerland's economic strength lies precisely in the opposite:
- high legal certainty
- regulatory predictability
- decision-making proximity
- identifiable political responsibility
The World Bank regularly points out that legal certainty is a key factor in economic attractiveness. Switzerland's comparative advantage lies in the clarity of its rules, not in their inflation.
Aligning Switzerland with a system that is overproducing legislation would be tantamount to importing legislative instability into a country whose competitiveness depends on stability.
The real debate
It's not about ideology, it's about governance.
When an institutional architecture produces 1,456 acts in one year, the question is no longer «to be for or against Europe». It becomes: what model of legal production do we want?
Should Switzerland internalise a mechanism that German industry itself considers unsustainable?
Conclusion
Switzerland's prosperity was not born of automatic compliance, but of institutional mastery.
Before we tie our economy down for good to a constantly accelerating standards machine, one question needs to be asked: do we want to import bureaucracy for the sake of a few months« »stability"... at the cost of our legal certainty?