To set an example, Portugal, which holds the six-month rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union, was the first Member State to submit its ‘Recovery and Resilience Plan’ (PRR) to the European Commission under the Next Generation EU Recovery Plan.
“The PRR now officially delivered, integrates the joint work with the Commission (since October) and the contributions resulting from the public consultation”, said the Portuguese authorities, hoping that the European level will be able to adopt it by the end of June.
The Portuguese recovery plan has a budget of €16.6 billion, of which €13.9 billion are grants. It aims to stimulate the climate and digital transitions and the modernisation of public administration (see EUROPE 12631/2, 12642/17).
It is now up to the Commission, within a maximum of two months, to analyse this plan in the light of the political priorities and procedural rules set out in the Regulation establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the budgetary instrument at the heart of Next Generation EU. In particular, the document submitted will have to be translated into a legal text that will serve as a basis for formal approval of the plan by the EU Council.
The ‘task force’ within the Commission, composed of about 80 people, will not wait to receive other national plans before analysing the Portuguese plan.
The President of the European institution, Ursula von der Leyen, recalled that the objective remained the adoption of the twenty-seven national recovery plans “by the summer”, with, in parallel, the ratification by the EU27 of the ‘Own Resources’ Decision in the EU budget, a sine qua non for the financing of the European recovery plan.
On Friday, Ms von der Leyen will meet Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Brussels for talks officially focusing on the Hungarian recovery plan.
In the European Parliament, the working group co-chaired by Irene Tinagli (S&D, Italy) and Johan van Overtveldt (ECR, Belgium), which is responsible for studying the national recovery plans, met for the first time on Wednesday.
See the Portuguese Recovery and Resilience Plan: https://bit.ly/2QqICc3 (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)