THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION Towards a new legislative term

FIVE YEARS WITH THE PILLAR OF SOCIAL RIGHTS: EUROPE’S SOCIAL SITUATION IN TIMES OF CRISES 81 leeway for countermeasures. The NextGenerationEU (NGEU) package clearly turned away from the course pursued during the euro crisis, which had focused on the responsibility of individual Member states and prioritised austerity measures. Instead, the EU took a completely new path. EU borrowing makes it possible to provide a total of 750 billion euros in financial trans- fers and loans. The majority of this will be allocated to Member states through the newly established European Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), also according to criteria of socio-economic impact. The key condition to receive money from the RRF is the approval of a Re- covery and Resilience Plan (RRP), coordinated with the Commission, which foresees investments and reforms until 2026. While action is obligatory in the fields of climate change and digitalisation, the RRP should also include the areas of social cohesion, health, education, and social resilience. Thus, the EU combines cyclical sup- port with structural objectives in the disbursement of the allocated funding. The European Semester was cho- sen as the coordination instrument for the exceptional financial assistance. During the pandemic, the social consequences of the economic slump of 2020 quickly became apparent.With a total volume of 100 billion euros on a loan basis, SURE complements national short-time work measures. In ad- dition, it became apparent which population groups were particularly vulnerable in the pandemic (European Commission 2020). These include children and adoles- cents due to daycare and school closures; single parents due to the need for home-schooling; women due to the disproportionate number of child-rearing and caregiv- ing tasks assigned to them as well as their often high share of part-time employment; people with disabilities due to their often insufficient integration into the labour market; people with a migration background and people with a low level of education due to often precarious employment situations, poor digital equipment or lack of skills; and the self-employed without sufficient pro- tection through social insurance. With the Social Summit in Porto on 7 and 8 May 2021, the EU intensified its efforts to consider the so- cial dimension in the pandemic and at the same time directed its attention to the further social challenges of the ecological and digital twin transformation. The Com- mission uses the EPSR as an instrument for this and is giving its implementation high priority in a correspond- ing Action Plan (European Commission 2021). In Porto, the Member states agreed on quantitative targets for the year 2030, which the Commission had proposed for three social headline indicators in the areas of employ- ment, training, and poverty reduction, as reflected in Table 2 . By strengthening the EPSR, the Commission is rais- ing the social dimension of EU crisis policy to a higher level, as the quantitative targets now complement those already in place in the areas of climate action and digi- talisation for Member states’ RRPs. In the Porto Declara- tion, the heads of state and government commit to the EPSR as a fundamental element of crisis policy: ‘The Eu- ropean Pillar of Social Rights is a fundamental element of the recovery. Its implementation will strengthen the Union’s drive towards a digital, green and fair transition and contribute to achieving upward social and econom- ic convergence and addressing the demographic chal- lenges’ (European Council 2021). With this additional strengthening in the crisis, the EU has succeeded in pri- oritising social issues retrospectively (Andor 2022). This is also evident regarding the RRF, through which the lion’s share of the funding of the NGEU package Table 2. EU social headline objectives for 2030 2016 2021 Target 2030 Percentage employment rate (20-to-64-year-olds) 69.6 73.1 78.0 Participation in continuing education in the last 12 months in per cent (20-to-64-year-olds ) 43.7 - 60.0 Number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in thousands (AROPE) 103,556 95,387 77,201 Source : European Commission (2023c); Eurostat; own calculations. The number of people experiencing poverty or social exclusion is expected to be reduced by at least 15 million until 2030 compared to 2019 levels.