EU leaders are meeting in Porto, Portugal on Friday to try to build a more social Europe after the economic damage of the pandemic, but there is a long way to go before concrete achievements as the Twenty-Seven are divided.
This "social summit" will start Friday at 1 pm local with conferences bringing together representatives of civil society, trade unionists and European leaders.
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The meeting between heads of state and government as such will begin in the evening, with a working dinner where international issues will also be discussed such as tensions with Russia and the lifting of patents on anti-Covid vaccines proposed Wednesday by US President Joe Biden. German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as Dutch Prime Ministers Mark Rutte and Maltese Robert Abela have given up on the trip and will participate remotely, due to the health situation.
It will continue on Saturday, the day when the Twenty-Seven should approve a Commission
“action plan”
in social matters, presented at the beginning of March and limited to three objectives by 2030. Brussels wants to increase the rate to 78%. employment, train at least 60% of adults every year and reduce the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by 15 million.
"Lack of ambition"
Left parties organized a counter-summit and planned to demonstrate in the streets of Porto on Saturday.
The EU's social action plan
"clearly lacks ambition,"
said Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on human rights.
He points out that 700,000 people in Europe sleep rough every night and more than 20 million workers live in poverty due to the increase in forms of precarious work, especially in new digital platforms.
According to him,
"an institutionalized race to the bottom among the Member States leads to lower wages (...) in the name of competitiveness"
.
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With the rise of poverty for a year, especially among young people and the most exposed workers, the pandemic has yet
"revealed the importance of the social"
in the EU, assured AFP the European Commissioner for 'Job, Nicolas Schmit. The fiscal austerity, which dominated Europe under German influence in the 2010s, may have lived. It is considered a failure by many economists.
“We have seen the consequences: rise of populism, poverty, unemployment. We understood that the recipes may not have been adapted. I think the lesson has been learned, ”
says Nicolas Schmit.
Europe has evolved: despite its divisions, it succeeded in adopting a recovery plan of 750 billion euros last year with unprecedented common debt.
One of the first measures taken in 2020, at the onset of the crisis, was to suspend the Stability Pact which imposes limits on budget deficits and public debt.
The measure, still in force, has enabled Member States to incur the necessary expenditure to protect jobs and revive the economy.
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Brussels recently launched legislative projects to try to better protect workers from new digital platforms or to impose an upward convergence of minimum wages in the EU.
Southern countries, such as France, Italy, Spain and Portugal are in favor.
But the countries of the North, attached to their efficient national models, and those of the East, which fear losing their competitiveness, reject any harmonization of minimum wages.
Result: the discussions drag on.
Saturday will also be held an EU-India summit by videoconference to relaunch bilateral relations and resume negotiations on a free trade agreement suspended since 2013.