The EU’s corona recovery plan continues to face resistance. Commissioner von der Leyen is now not at all sure that she will get the EU member states in line. Especially since her former boss Merkel still has some concerns.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen does not believe that the special summit on the corona reconstruction plan planned for mid-July will fail. It has to be seen whether an agreement can be reached in the first attempt, she told the “Handelsblatt”. You may need a second summit.
At a video conference about a week ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel and several of her colleagues voiced numerous criticisms of the EU Commission’s proposal for a billion-dollar program to deal with the Corona economic crisis. For example, countries like the Netherlands do not want EU aid to be given in the form of non-repayable grants. Germany criticizes, among other things, the criteria for the allocation of funds.
The current proposal of the EU Commission specifically envisages raising 750 billion euros in the financial markets and then putting the money into an economic and investment program. 500 billion euros could therefore flow as grants to the EU countries, the rest as loans. The debts are to be paid off from the EU budget by 2058. The plan is being negotiated together with the next seven-year EU financial framework, for which the Commission is targeting 1.1 trillion euros.
Von der Leyen justifies the planned granting of grants in the “Handelsblatt” with the fact that highly indebted member states like Italy should not “cut off the air with ever higher interest burdens”. At the same time, it makes it clear that states like the Netherlands could rightly demand reform requirements.
The special summit is scheduled for July 17 and 18. It will be the first time since the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic that the heads of state and government of the European Union meet again in person in Brussels.
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