Declaration on the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plans

On behalf of the European Semester Group: Javier Doz Orrit, President - Gonçalo Lobo Xavier, Vice-President - Luca Jahier, Vice-President

The EESC welcomes Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (under the Recovery and Resilience Facility or RRF) as the first one officially submitted to the Commission. The plan focuses on resilience and the climate and digital transitions and concerns almost all the EU flagship areas (6 out of 7). The requested EUR 13.9 billion in grants and EUR 2.7 billion in loans under the RRF will be subject to the entry into force of the Own Resources Decision, which must first be approved by all Member States, some of which have, unfortunately, not yet done so. The Plan is the result of intensive dialogue between the Portuguese government and the EU Task Force over the last few months. The Plan presented by the Portuguese authorities is available here (in Portuguese). We congratulate Portugal on having opened the list and we call on all other Member States to follow suit in the coming days to ensure that the majority of the plans are finalised and formally presented to the Commission before the end of April.
This act opens the next phase in the implementation of the broadest-ever measures taken by the EU to tackle the pandemic and build a prospect of recovery and resilience for all, and the EU needs to act fast in order to have all plans adopted before the summer and the first payments to be made during the summer.
The EESC will therefore continue to engage with the content of the plans and to involve organised civil society, in close cooperation with the European Commission and the European Parliament. A first step in this process will be our conference on the RRF and the status of the NextGenerationEU on 31 May.