The EU Commission has presented its draft amendment to Regulation (EU) 2019/1238 on a pan-European personal pension product (PEPP).

Any reform project should start with a clear-eyed, honest assessment of the current situation. That kind of straightforwardness is the foundation of credibility in politics today.

This is precisely where the EU Commission still falls short of what the public can reasonably expect. In 2019, it introduced a rulebook for distributing a pan-European pension product with lofty ambitions. Six years later, a reality check is sobering: only two niche providers in Slovakia and Cyprus currently offer a PEPP. Is that not, plainly, a failure?

In the Commission’s more gentle wording, this is merely an interim outcome: “The PEPP has not yet achieved the expected commercial success.”

Yet, contrary to the most obvious conclusion, responsibility is not attributed to the design flaws that many market participants warned would make failure likely. Instead, the Commission states: “The framework created by the PEPP Regulation has…