Over the past years, many European Countries have taken a significant measures that clearly fall within the traditional area of industrial policies. These include, inter alia, bailouts or the infusion of public capital into banks, support to struggling national enterprises and attempts to invest in research and development plans. Additional mechanisms of public governance of the economy have been strengthened in many European countries in order to regulate foreign investments. This specific kind of legal tools – such as golden shares/golden power – arises however relevant issues about the compatibility between national protection of strategic assets or companies and the European principle of free movement of capital and freedom of establishment. This paper aims at providing a critical analysis of national economic “defensive“ measures, in order to understand whether their application can be considered an expression of a new stable form of “State capitalism“.