Nearly 200 officials from the EU Commission’s reform department are set to be merged with another division responsible for handing out the EU’s pandemic recovery funds, which is directly overseen by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Politico recently revealed based on multiple insider sources.
Besides being yet another obvious power grab from ‘Queen Ursula,’ the reshuffle also paves the way for introducing a so-called “cash-for-reforms” model for all tranches of the EU funds, including cohesion funding which countries and regions until now could access without any strings attached, simply for on having lower GDPs per capita than the EU average.
The ‘conditionality mechanism’ for accessing the COVID-19 recovery funds—based on the completion of certain reforms and investments—was introduced in December 2020, and many member states only agreed to the scheme because they believed it was a singular measure, justified by the extraordinary circumstances posed by the pandemic.
Little did they know that the Commission’s plan had been to eventually extend the model to all types of EU funding. They certainly should have foreseen it; once the Commission is given the unprecedented power to decide who ‘deserves’ to get their money—for which they already ‘paid,’ as the pandemic recovery program was financed through a joint EU loan—it’s naïve to expect the institution to just let it go.
Under von der Leyen’s new vision (which was first proposed back in March but has been gaining new momentum lately), each EU member state would have its own specific reform roadmap given to them, linking each payment to certain milestones along the way. These reform expectations could target any area from economy to administration, even the judiciary, and even the rule of law, and are expected to be published sometime in the second half of next year.
Given the arbitrary and often ideologically driven use of the conditionality mechanism in areas it already touches, the scale of the potential political abuse of such a system is hard to overstate. Member states in the Council would need to unanimously approve the scheme, of course, but the history of such initiatives shows that the Commission always finds a way to push them through in the end.
The initial narrative will probably go along the lines that the Commission would only require member states to cut administrative red tape or invest in key industries, and leave the ideological factor out of the picture. But the writing is already on the wall: Sweden and Finland, for instance, jointly called for rule-of-law conditionality to be tied to all types of EU funds—including cohesion funds and direct agricultural subsidies—just two months ago, arguing that payments based on adherence to “common values, notably rule of law, democracy, and fundamental rights,” should be a “general feature in all areas of the EU budget.”
Furthermore, the fact that this ‘cash-for-reforms’ scheme would be directly overseen by von der Leyen after the personnel reshuffle also means that the Cohesion and Reform portfolio in the Commission would get significantly weaker. Incidentally, that portfolio is owned by Italy’s Raffaele Fitto, the only conservative candidate who was given an executive vice-presidential seat in the new cabinet. The fact that Fitto was approved by the leftist parties, in the end, might also indicate that they were banking on his role to become largely decorative in the long run anyway.But even if Fitto could stop this new tool of ideological blackmail being developed in Brussels, he probably won’t. Despite his political background and the fact that he’s coming from one of the main recipient countries of the EU cohesion policy, Fitto endorsed a future ‘cash-for-reforms’ model during his confirmation hearing, arguing that it could incentivize “EU-friendly” reforms across Europe. It’s more important to be a commissioner than to be a conservative, it seems.
