Prime Minister António Costa proposed reforms this Friday to turn the European Union (EU) into a “great institutional building”, where everyone participates and “uses the spaces they want to use”, with the aim of avoiding blockages, and set a “permanent PRR”. crises.
Speaking at the end of an informal European summit held in the Spanish city of Granada and focused on institutional reforms to prepare the EU for challenges such as enlargement and migration, the head of government indicated to his colleagues the vision of a Union as “ a large institutional building,” in which countries “use only some of the spaces they really want to use.”
What is certain is that in order to “structure the future of the Union, everyone must participate” in the European project, he added.
António Costa even made a comparison: “as if it were a shopping center, with a common area”, but also with spaces such as restaurants and shops, where only “those who want to eat” or “those who want to buy clothes” go, respectively.
The idea would be to “avoid consecutive blocking issues” like today’s, he stressed, referring to the “dispute of two Member States on the migration paragraph” in the final declaration.
Pressure from Hungary and Poland today led to the removal of a paragraph on migration from the final declaration of the informal European Council in Grenada, as these countries contested the new migration rules and defended a unanimous vote.
Still on the institutional issue and at a time when the revision of the EU’s fiscal architecture is being discussed, António Costa proposed a kind of “permanent PRR”, in an allusion to the post-covid-19 recovery and resilience plan, to ensure “financing of investments and reforms”, especially in crisis situations.
Because it was an informal meeting, no decisions had to be made.
Yet the Portuguese prime minister said he did not feel “any rejection” of his vision for the future of Europe.
Costa rejects the renewal deadline and allows joinings on different dates
The Prime Minister rejected a “fixed date” for European Union expansion as he spoke of new members in 2030, stressing that countries could join at different times.
“No one has a fixed date on which this enlargement process will be completed, nor is it necessary for it to be carried out at the same time,” Costa said, recalling that “there are countries with which the negotiation processes have not yet been opened, others with which the negotiation processes have already are practically completed and therefore the temporality may be different”.
“What everyone agreed on is that for a successful enlargement it is essential that this internal reform is completed, but that this internal reform cannot be a pretext for not expanding,” António Costa stressed.
According to the person in charge, “there are two processes that must take place in parallel and synchronized”.
One topic on the table at this informal European Council was enlargement, with EU leaders expected to give the green light by the end of the year to opening formal negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, which they held in 2011 obtained. official status of candidate countries for the community bloc by mid-2022.
In the EU, some senior officials, such as European Council President Charles Michel, are also talking about the 2030 date for the community’s expansion.
For António Costa, the expansion of the community should not mean that “the EU becomes weaker”.
“We need it to remain a successful model that attracts candidate countries,” he said.
Source: DN
