The adoption by the European Union of an economic recovery plan, amounting to 750 billion euro in direct subsidies and loans for all its member states, had the great merit of restoring confidence in the EU’s capacity to act in the face of major external challenges. The recovery plan (also known as Next Generation EU) is a major shift in EU economic policy, away from austerity and controls of national fiscal policy, towards the creation of a fiscal capacity at the European level through massive borrowing on the financial markets. The adoption of the programme required creative legal engineering, to exploit the available legal bases for EU action and comply with the legal constraints on EU public finances. Whether the recovery plan also causes a deep institutional transformation of the European Union, as is sometimes argued, is far less certain.

The presentation will be based on an article by the author that is forthcoming on 1 June in Common Market Law Review 2021, nr 3.

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