Is Europe’s regulatory zeitgeist shifting? Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, strode into last week’s European Industry Summit declaring that overregulation was stifling economic growth, in turn sapping the continent’s geopolitical clout. His prescription was for a “regulatory clean slate”. Rule trims or regulatory consultations just won’t cut it any more. What is needed, Merz claimed, is a new mindset aiming to “deregulate every sector.”

European leaders have these competitiveness spasms pretty regularly. Usually their revealed preference for extensive regulation wins out once the trade-offs bite and the interest groups mobilise. Still, this time may be different. Energy shocks, US technological outperformance, and the Russian threat have concentrated minds. Even Sir Keir Starmer — when he’s not adding new employment “rights” — bemoans how long our infrastructure projects take, urging British regulators to reprioritise growth here.

The acid test, of course, is not whether politicians can say “deregulation” without choking. It is whether they can really deliver it. On that front, European governments might consult Federico Sturzenegger, President Milei’s minister for deregulation and state reform. In a December lecture, he described how he stripped out so many rules in Argentina that his own team struggles to count them. While Argentina had plenty of low-hanging fruit, his three core lessons are worth understanding here.

First, Sturzenegger reminds us that politics is a paperwork sport. Governments can set ambitions and promises, but the real action is in legislative and regulatory drafting and revision, where interest groups and stakeholders often pair up with bureaucracies to water down reform.

The implication is that real deregulation starts in opposition. You need specialist teams drafting the statute-book language in advance, making line edits of repeals, replacements, and hard rewrites of regulators’ statutory duties. Leave it until you are in office talking about “a plan” or “a consultation” and you have already lost. What emerges from the Whitehall machine will be the compromise reflecting both civil service orthodoxy and stakeholder special pleading.

Second, as with tax reform, picking fights with one sector or group at a time for deregulation will ensure failure. Sturzenegger compares interest groups to the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, constantly testing your fences for weakness. If reform drips out industry by industry, incumbents co-ordinate, opponents pick off proposals and you spend political capital dying in committee rooms.

The answer is to deregulate lots of provisions and sectors simultaneously. That thins any media campaigns, disorients your opposition, and flips the political economy. Once rules are being shed and entrants and consumers benefit, the incentive becomes to fight for stripping others’ privileges away. As such, deregulation becomes a virtuous circle.

Finally, in prioritising reforms, Sturzenegger suggests reviewing price signals. In Argentina, a basic Toyota Yaris cost roughly the price of a Tesla in the US. That screamed that import restrictions, taxes and licensing were having crushing effects on Argentine consumers.

Britain’s product markets rarely throw up such glaring inefficiencies, but our land and energy costs do certainly scream regulatory scarcity. An acre of farmland can trade for a five-figure sum. Grant it residential planning permission and the value can jump to millions. That uplift is the capitalised value of planning permission under scarcity.

True, Britain has different problems than Argentina overall. Our product and labour markets start freer. We have many independent regulators with wide discretion. We also have important meta-laws — like equalities duties — that make pre-writing harder and sloppy reform litigable.

But these only enhance Sturzenegger’s case for doing your homework early. Argentina went from a thicket of controls to being, in some areas like rental markets, more liberal than Britain. This reflected a principled commitment to liberalisation, but with a clear method to match that ambition.

Merz is right that European countries will not grow significantly faster just by nibbling at the margins. Yet, unless we heed Sturzenegger’s warnings about process and prioritisation, “deregulation” will remain a buzzword rather than an outcome.