The European Semester has long been the EU’s central instrument for coordinating economic and fiscal policies. Its effectiveness in steering national reforms was limited in the pre-COVID era, when enforcement relied mainly on soft coordination and weak sanctions. The launch of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) under the Next Generation EU (NGEU) marked a turning point, embedding the Semester within a framework of incentive-based conditionality tied to unprecedented EU funding. This presentation examines how the Semester has evolved across these two phases, pre- and post-NGEU, and whether the shift from sanctions to financial incentives has strengthened compliance with Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs). It also considers the legal-institutional, macroeconomic, political, and sectoral factors shaping implementation. The reflection draws on two original quantitative studies: one tracing long-term shifts in compliance, the other using evaluation differentials to assess the impact of RRF funding in the post-NGEU era.