2026 European Semester – Autumn Package

Key points

The EESC:

• regrets, that the Commission has once again refrained from presenting the Annual Sustainable Growth Survey (ASGS) and stresses that sustainable economic growth is a necessary condition for Europe to meet its multiple commitments, welcomes the European Macroeconomic Report, which provides a deep dive into the underlying structural challenges facing the EU and the new recommendation on human capital, which is a crucial element in filling the EU technological gap, also taking into account the EU demographic challenge;
• reiterates its call for more robust common fiscal capacity, supported by targeted issuances of joint debt, to help fill this growing gap in public investment, and for permanent macroeconomic stabilisation instruments to address shocks, based on experience with the European instrument for temporary support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency (SURE), which should be made permanent;
• remains alarmed by the fragmentation of the EU financial markets and calls on the Commission to assess whether an EU-level set of instruments, equivalent to the US National Securities Markets Improvement Act (NSMIA), could simplify cross-border market access, reduce compliance fragmentation and support deeper, more efficient and more liquid markets, while maintaining the necessary level of current security;
• reiterates its call for the Commission to urgently revise the set of proposed indicators to monitor the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP). Monitoring the evolution of combined leverage instead of sticking to silos could be part of the solution to improve the current MIP scoreboard;
• considers it necessary to make more streamlined use of the Social Scoreboard, a revised MIP scoreboard, and a revised debt sustainability analysis (DSA) methodology, complemented by the new wellbeing indicators proposed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC);
• asks the Commission to treat the social convergence framework as being on the same level as the fiscal one and to formulate clear recommendations to each Member State accordingly in the next Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) and calls on the Commission to propose concrete incentives for Member States to increase the use of the flexibility clause for social investments;
• reiterates its call for an in-depth analysis and clarification on the announced connections between the European Semester, the Competitiveness Coordination Tool and the proposed future Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF);
• calls on the European Parliament to establish – as is the case for the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) – a permanent monitoring and assessment committee for the ‘new’ European Semester, the implementation and annual assessment of the medium-term fiscal-structural plans (MTFSPs), the CSRs, and their concrete interconnections with the future national and regional partnership plans (NRPPs);
• calls on the Commission to frame the escape clause as a temporary emergency instrument rather than as a substitute for a coherent long-term fiscal and growth strategy and calls on the Commission to assess the increasing role played by defence spending in the EU’s sustainable growth and its impact on employment and future fiscal stability;
• reiterates its calls for the more robust, structured and meaningful involvement of social partners and Civil Society Organisations at European, national and local level, in implementing the Semester cycle.