Democracy and the European project “face immense dangers,” says the European Commissioner for Cohesion, Elisa Ferreira (Oporto, 1955), in an interview with La Vanguardia in which she demands a strong cohesion policy and warns that without a increase in the budget – now 1% of European GDP – the EU “will not have the necessary unity nor will it be able to face the new challenges.”
How do you see the current political climate?
There is a very violent public discourse that touches many people who do not have emotional stability, especially after the pandemic. This does not happen by chance. There is an aggressive international agenda that tries to destroy Europe not only from the outside, but from within, through social networks and the irresponsible press. The European project cannot survive if we are not in a position to defend our values ??and set limits on what is legitimately done or said.
In what sense?
We want an independent and responsible press, but at the same time we have to limit strategic disinformation, narratives or fake news that stimulate the most fragile in society and inspire fear that makes people vote for parties that have nothing to offer. . We live in a very difficult time in which there are people who have a feeling of not belonging, of feeling forgotten and disconnected from current dynamics.
Have you detected a relationship between extremist voting and lack of economic development?
This is one of the conclusions of the 9th report on cohesion policy. Several university investigations have found a relationship between certain economic situations and that vote. The traditional correlation was people unemployed or with precarious employment, but it also exists in regions that have been stagnant and losing dynamism for 15 or 20 years. So it is something that can occur at the lowest level of economic development, but also at a high or intermediate level in case of stagnation. I think it is very important to be aware that when there are no perspectives, there are fears. The poorest may lose hope of getting better. The rich, to lose what they have. That is why in the future, cohesion policy must cover all situations, reaching rich and poor, maintaining basic principles such as providing proportionally stronger support for those who cannot help themselves and with more sophisticated financial instruments for regions. with a high level of development, but with difficulties in maintaining its competitiveness at an international level.
Where is cohesion policy going? In the communication published with that report they talk about “embracing innovative techniques” and the possibility of linking payments to reforms. Are we headed for a revolution?
No, no, but the next Commission will decide that, in agreement with the new Parliament and the Council. Now we are at the moment of making decisions because there are issues that have gained a lot of importance on the European agenda, such as defence, climate, health and aging, and there is also enlargement. None of this will work without strengthening cohesion policy, which is what keeps Europe together.
What can be changed or improved and what should not be touched?
Flexibility should not be changed because a regional approach is needed; different realities must be taken into account. Neither does the principle of proportionality (the poorest should receive more) nor the shared management of projects between the central, regional and local levels. Next, it is important to maintain partnerships: when working seven or ten years away, it is necessary to involve not only those in power at that moment, but also the entire civil society, local and regional structures, unions, employers… All of this seems unquestionable to me. Where we can improve is in simplifying bureaucratic procedures, it is something we are already doing in this period. Also the quality of public administration, because we are asking a lot from the people. And we can talk about reforms, but regional policy is territorial policy. It may be interesting to associate the use of funds with reforms, but we have to see what we are talking about because the most typical ones correspond to the central level. There are some things that could be incorporated, that would make regional policy more effective, such as improving clean energy connections to the grid or the digitalization of projects, things like that, but we are not talking about revolutions.
The EU has opened its doors to Ukraine, but does not talk about the cost. Will some receive less?
Not necessarily. It doesn’t seem to me that we can continue with a common budget of 1%. We implicitly recognized this in the pandemic with two decisions. The first, three weeks after starting, the reprogramming of 23,000 million euros of funds (4,000 million were for Spain) to buy vaccines and to pay salaries to SMEs; In Spain many people may not have realized it but the cohesion policy was changed to do that. And the second decision that we made at a good time was to issue shared debt to launch the Recovery and Resilience Fund. We feared an economic crisis like the one that followed the Second World War and it did not happen, in 2021 or 2022 the countries had returned to pre-pandemic income. That is why I do not believe that we can face the period that now opens before the EU without reviewing the size of the budget, no matter how divisive the issue may be. As Jacques Delors said and President Ursula von der Leyen recalled upon his death, there cannot be an internal market without cohesion, there cannot be a deepening of that market without a reinforcement of cohesion and there cannot be an enlargement without a reinforcement of cohesion policy. It seems absolutely essential to me.
How could this reinforcement of the budget be financed?
The EU has a number of sources of own resources that we have to revisit and we have some ideas: from taxes on multinationals based on the OECD, those related to climate policy and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the barrier European Union on imports to compensate for environmental policy, or a tax on financial products, for example. It will also be necessary to decide what to do with the debt incurred to launch the FRR, because from 2027 you have to start paying, but it could be refinanced. All of this needs to be addressed and also the contributions of Member States. The budgetary issue is going to be decisive for the future of the EU. The enlargement strategy alone is already going to require a very substantial growth in the budget, but if we add to that all the new ambitions in terms of innovation, common defense, research, climate… If all of this is going to be done at the expense of cohesion between the regions, we are not going to have enough political unity among us to do it.
In one of its latest reports on the implementation of the cohesion policy, Spain appeared a little behind compared to other exercises and other countries. Do you see any absorptive capacity problem, in the context of money also coming through the FRR and the NextGeneration funds in particular?
I don’t believe it. It will sound strange to say it like this but right now there is a lot of money on the table from many funds and the effort that the public administration has to make is important. But it doesn’t seem to me that Spain is going to have an execution problem in the end. Spain has a project registry larger than the allocated funds so you can always enter projects. At this moment it is below the European average in execution, but there is the possibility of extending the deadlines, there is one more year to manage all the bureaucracy until the programs are closed. The start of the 2021-2027 period was a bit slow for all countries. I am in contact with those responsible for managing funds in Spain and they have guaranteed me that they will exhaust all the cohesion policy funds. And I believe them because they have a very competent procedural management structure and a lot of experience. At the moment, it seems to me that we have to think about the territory and give more visibility to the different territorial dimensions, especially in a country as large and diversified as Spain. It is something that can definitely give a very interesting boost to the 2021-2027 structural funds. But for that we must maintain the degree of collective demand. If we rest on our laurels because we know that we have a huge amount of money to invest and if people fall into a logic of routine and trivialization, there would be a great danger of not doing what we all know must be done. I think that in Spain there are very interesting projects in terms of clean energy, innovation, research, changing the way of doing agriculture and doing industry in a more sustainable way in environmental terms.
