BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned in a joint opinion piece for the Financial Times that the European Union had to make dramatic efforts to improve its competitiveness or risk seeing its way of living undermined.

Among the reforms needed were further efforts to decarbonize the economy, while leaving the precise means of doing so up to member states, they wrote, in what seemed to be a boost for the French nuclear power industry.

The leaders also urged European Union member states to complete the single financial market by introducing common insolvency, tax and investment frameworks.

“We can’t take for granted the foundations on which we have built our European way of living and our role in the world,” they wrote in the article, due to appear in Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper.

“Our Europe is mortal, and we must rise to the challenge.”