The President of the Government, António Costa, defended this Thursday a European mechanism to deal with the rise in energy prices, hoping that the example of the response to the pandemic will be followed, and not the “error” of individual solutions. in previous crises.
Speaking upon his arrival at Prague Castle, the scene of a meeting of the new European Political Community today, which will be followed on Friday by an informal summit of European Union leaders, António Costa insisted on the need for the community bloc to endow “a common response mechanism” to the energy price crisis, even suggesting that this can be done with existing resources, namely the unused funds from the ‘bazooka’ created for the pandemic crisis of Covid-19, the ‘NextGenerationEU’.
Asked specifically about Germany’s new ‘bazooka’, an aid package of 200,000 million euros for German families and companies to deal with high energy prices, the head of government replied that “the example of the German economic package , such as the packages that each country has been adopting based on its own budgetary capacity, what they show is that, in addition to each country’s own capacity, it is essential to have a common response mechanism from the EU”, as happened in 2020, in the face of the crisis caused by the pandemic.
António Costa recalled that, in the face of the pandemic crisis, the EU was able to “overcome the limits of individual intervention of each of the States and have a joint response”.
“Now the key question, and this is the discussion we have to have, is whether we are going to make the mistake of crises again. [financeira e da dívida soberana] 2008, and each one takes the measures for himself, and according to his abilities, or we learn the good lessons of Covid and we realize that it is essential to have a common fund to respond together to this challenge, which is a global challenge for all us,” he declared.
Costa recalled that the program [de apoio ao emprego] SURE, launched during the pandemic, “was key to stabilizing employment, keeping jobs, keeping businesses running” and argued that “Europe must always seek to retain good lessons and good experiences”.
Announced in April 2020 due to the pandemic, this new financial instrument stipulated a total of 100,000 million euros for the 27 Member States to support companies and the self-employed to maintain jobs and income, functioning as temporary unemployment (through the Reduction of the working day). hours) in order to safeguard jobs.
“We tested well in Covid, why not do it now?” he asked, noting that the goal of a new program along the same lines is for it to change, but “the logic must be the same” and “the mechanism is already created. “.
The prime minister has pointed out that, at that time, “the objective was different” and it was mainly to pay the ‘lay-off’, that is, “finance companies to keep jobs inactive because the great message was ‘stay at home because we have to protect ourselves from pollution'”, while “at the moment the message is the opposite”, in the sense of “supporting companies to maintain their activity and, despite the brutal increase in energy costs, maintain the employment, maintain the activity”.
Defending that the EU must use the same mechanism and the same logic, he insisted that only the objective changes, “from ‘lay-off’ to ‘lay-on'”.
António Costa then drew attention to the fact that “several countries” had unilaterally renounced the use of funds from their Recovery and Resilience Plans (PRR) to advocate for a possible reprogramming of funds.
After pointing out that the European Commission has contracted a global loan and ‘NextGeneration’ has two dimensions, one of grants and the other of loans, he stressed that the funds result from “a debt contracted by the Union, which therefore would not have to contract new debt”, and gave as an example the case of Portugal, which, of the approximately 15,000 million euros of available loans, indicated “the willingness to use 3,000 million”.
“If we were asked the question like this: ‘then are these 12 billion available so that they are not going to be used under the NextGeneration’, and the other States were asked ‘are they available so that the Commission reprograms them without increasing the new debt of the Union, to finance a program now aimed at supporting companies to deal with this energy crisis?’ we could say that they could be allocated to that fund,” he said.
According to Costa, “like Portugal, surely other countries are in the same conditions”.
“So, before we start discussing whether new debt is needed, we could have another more practical discussion, which is: of the existing resources mobilized by the EU, what is available to finance a program of this nature,” he concluded. we want the community bloc to follow “the good lessons” of the recent past and not repeat “the mistake of the 2008 crises”.
The Prime Minister spoke to journalists upon his arrival at Prague Castle, the scene of the first meeting of the newly formed European Political Community, which today brings together 44 heads of state and government from the European continent in the Czech capital, and to which they will follow an informal summit on Friday, which will be dominated by energy prices.
The imposition of a ‘ceiling’ on gas prices, demanded by a growing number of Member States, including Portugal, should be the ‘hottest’ topic of the discussions, given the resistance, among others, of Germany, criticized by several capitals that choose to ‘inject’ 200,000 million euros to help families and companies cope with energy prices, in what many Member States, which do not have the same budgetary capacity, understand as an individualist position, with the ‘coverage’ of the European Commission.
Source: TSF
