At this year’s Gaia-X Summit, European government leaders stressed that digital government is not theory. It’s about everyday life, public services and the data behind them.
Gaia-X is a European project that aims to create a trusted, secure and interoperable way for organisations to share and use data. It sets common rules and standards and provides technology to support digital services while helping countries and industries avoid being locked into a single cloud or technology provider.
The organisation’s Summit in Porto, Portugal played host to a line-up of European digital government leaders. Among them, Porto’s new city councillor for youth, sports and digital transformation explained that the city treats itself as a “living lab”, where data-driven services are tested in real streets, with real people.
Rodrigo Passos highlighted the city’s cross-border work with Amsterdam and Helsinki on a traffic-flow data space that shares mobility and environmental information to cut congestion and pollution.
“We are not here to digitise bureaucracy,” he said. “We want to use technology to review useless steps and to make life easier for our citizens and for our companies.”
That philosophy is being embedded into national policy. Portugal’s secretary of state for digitalisation, Bernardo Correia, positioned the country’s digital transformation as a route to “the biggest amount of prosperity possible.”
He argued that state reform must begin with simplification and only then move to digitalisation, echoing Passos’ warning against automating bad processes. Portugal has appointed its first chief technology officer and aims for 100 percent of public services to be available digitally by 2030, delivered through mobile-first design and anchored in sovereign cloud infrastructure.
Gaia-X CEO, Ulrich Ahle, reinforced the point, praising Portugal’s stance on redesigning processes before digitising them. “Public sector data are becoming more and more important to provide services to the citizens,” he told Think Digital Partners. “Digitisation is not only about digitising existing processes. It starts with the simplification of existing processes and then to digitise it. And all this digitisation is based on data.”
France Turns Sovereignty into a Strategy
While Portugal focused on the operational side of sovereign digital government, France used the summit to press forward a policy agenda. France’s minister delegate for AI and digital affairs, Anne Le Hénanff, said that Europe has reached “major milestones” through the Data Act, the Data Governance Act and the AI coordinated action plan.
She outlined four priorities: a European preference in public procurement; excluding services that allow extraterritorial access to data; extending the Digital Markets Act approach to cloud hyperscalers; and simplifying regulation where necessary.
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Le Hénanff’s message was that sovereignty is a competitive strategy, not just a defensive one. She argued that industry, government and researchers should align behind a shared European data infrastructure. The emphasis was on coordination not in theory, but in procurement, standards and market design.
Germany Pushes Interoperability and Startup Growth
Germany struck a similarly practical note. Thomas Jarzombek, state secretary for digitalisation and government modernisation, reminded delegates that Gaia-X began as a Franco-German initiative. It may not have achieved its early ambition of becoming a full European alternative to hyperscalers, he said, but it has succeeded in establishing data space standards and interoperability frameworks on which industry now depends.
“The core of digitalisation is data,” he said, stressing the need for common standards across municipalities, supply chains and industrial production.
Germany is now using government procurement as an accelerator, acting as what Jarzombek called an “anchor customer” to help startups scale. It is embedding AI in public administration, starting with complex permitting for infrastructure, and is funding competitions for small firms to develop generative AI tools for local government.
Can the UK Learn Anything From Europe’s Approach?
For a UK digital government audience, the debates in Porto offer three notable lessons.
The first is that simplification is not optional. Both the city of Porto and the Portuguese government were explicit that digitising bad processes leads only to better-designed bureaucracy.
Second, sovereignty is being treated as an enabler of competitiveness. France is using procurement to preference European solutions; Germany is using the state to help startups scale; Portugal is tying sovereign cloud to its AI research capabilities. The UK may no longer be part of the EU framework, but it still faces the same dependency risks and still has the same opportunity to use the public sector’s buying power to shape the market for secure cloud, data and AI services.
Finally, European governments are grounding digital sovereignty in tangible, city-level outcomes. Porto’s traffic-flow data space is not a theoretical exercise; it is something commuters will feel. Germany’s AI permitting is aimed at real infrastructure delays. Portugal’s digital skills push – recognising that only 56 percent of its citizens have basic digital skills – is tied to concrete targets.
Across the summit, European digital leaders platformed data standards and citizen-focused services which showed a continent trying to do digital government differently.
