2026 European Semester – Autumn Package

Background

In November 2025, the European Commission presented the 2026 European Semester Autumn Package and launched the 2026 European Semester cycle. The end goal is to boost the EU’s competitiveness and to secure sustainable prosperity. Against a backdrop of increasingly challenging geopolitical environment coordinated action is essential.

In the opinion, the Committee provides key recommendations on the 2026 European Semester - Autumn package, addressing crucial economic and social challenges facing the EU. The EESC highlights the importance of investment and stresses the need of addressing the fragmentation of EU financial markets, reinforcing economic and social governance, recognising human capital as strategic infrastructure, and embedding European defence cooperation within a fiscal and strategic EU framework.

The Committee also underlines that the European Semester must remain transparent, democratically accountable and grounded in broad societal participation.

Key points

In the opinion, 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;
• 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).

Additional information

Section: Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion (ECO)

Opinion number: ECO/688

Opinion type: Mandatory

Referral: COM(2025) 955 final

Rapporteur: Luca Jahier (Group III - Italy)

Date of adoption by section: 5 February 2026

Result of the vote: 66 in favour, 0 against, 0 abstentions

Date of adoption in plenary: 18-19 February 2026

Result of the vote: 205 in favour, 0 against, 4 abstentions

Contact

Marco Pezzani

Press Officer

Tel.: +32 2 546 9793 | Mob: +32 470 881 903

E-mail: marco.pezzani@eesc.europa.eu

Anna Pantazi

Administrator

Tel.: +32 2 546 9231

E-mail: anna.pantazi@eesc.europa.eu