The prime minister is in Prague for the first meeting of the European Political Community and the informal European Council, pointing to the need for “a common European Union mechanism” to respond to the crisis, as happened during the pandemic. António Costa referred to mechanisms such as SURE and paid measures under this program such as dismissal, saying that now there must be a “lay-on”.
Arriving at the meetings on Thursday and Friday, Costa spoke of the need to “overcome a global crisis together” and not repeat what happened in 2008, in the face of the financial crisis. “The key question is whether we are going to make the mistake of the 2008 crises again and let each one act for himself or learn the good lessons of Covid and realize that it is essential to have a common fund to respond together to the crisis. World crisis. challenge”. This is the discussion they want to see made in the informal Council that meets this Friday.
The prime minister was asked about the aid packages that some member states are applying, specifically the German one (200,000 million euros in support for families and companies) and considers that “in addition to the capacity of each country, it is essential to have a mechanism common to the European Union. What happened in Covid is that we were able to go beyond the limits of individual intervention” of each of the states, the prime minister continued in response to journalists.
In this sense, he gave the example of SURE, created by the EU to “support employment and keep people in the labor market during the pandemic”, saying that at this time “the mechanism must be extended: support companies to to maintain the activity so that despite the brutal increase in energy costs, they maintain the company and the workers”. “Before it paid to be at home, now it pays to continue,” he said, comparing this mechanism to the layoff generated by the pandemic.
Costa was also asked about the common debt that he defended as it had already shown “to be a good solution”. But he focuses above all on the availability of resources to draw up a common package of measures to respond to the current crisis. “It remains to be shown that there is no budgetary capacity among the resources available in the EU to, at least, advance as in the SURE field. And he insists that “before starting to discuss whether new debt is needed, a more practical discussion can be made, which is to know if what is available from the existing resources mobilized by the EU to mobilize a program of this nature.”
Source: Observadora
