I have a genuine question about this movement. Small businesses and startups aren’t the problem. Why “buy from EU” instead of “stop buying from big corporations” regardless of their countries? Small businesses (from anywhere) cannot absorb the rising costs and tariffs, and they are struggling.
One main reason: market consolidation in Europe is a real need. Only companies with a lot of scale can compete adequately in terms of product featureset and innovation. European alternatives usually lack scale to to compete.
In simple terms, if you’re competing in an R&D heavy industry (like consumer technology, software, f.e.) having 2 or 3 big companies is always going to lead to more competitive products when compared to a market with 20 or 30 small ones. The problem with Europe is that that we don’t even have 20 or 30 small ones.
Take Nothing for example, I think their idea is to compete with Apple, Google and the Chinese brands in the phone market. But they are many, many times smaller than those. So they’re going to be forced to use components and technology that’s already established, they’re not going to innovate outside of design and simple things like UI simply because they lack the funding to do anything else.
The situation is not ideal, but unless we create our own behemoths, we won’t be able to compete in the short term.