The Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, Elisa Ferreira, and the Chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI), Younous Omarjee (The Left, France), jointly announced the presentation of a new package of measures, entitled CARE+, to help regions cope with the influx of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, in the margins of the European Parliament’s mini-plenary session on Thursday 24 March.
“Unfortunately, the situation keeps evolving, and the number of refugees keeps climbing. So yesterday the Commission proposed additional measures which would mean €3.4 billion of extra-liquidity mobilised this year by increasing the pre-financing from REACT-EU to 15% front-loading for all Member States, and to 45% for those Member States who are more exposed to the refugee crisis”, the Commissioner explained in the press room.
This “maximum exposure” is calculated on the basis of the countries that are accommodating the highest share of refugees fleeing from Ukraine in proportion of their own population. “This effectively front-loads the available resources to help alleviate the burden on the public budget”, explained Ms Ferreira.
The text, adopted the day before by the College of Commissioners, states that the 45% pre-financing applies to frontline Member States or those that between 24 February 2022 and 23 March 2022 recorded a number of arrivals of people from Ukraine exceeding 1% of their national population.
This relates to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Estonia, it was confirmed.
The REACT-EU regulation initially set the pre-financing rate at 11%. The European Commission has increased it for all EU regions by 4% and by 34% for frontline regions.
This is a new EU response mechanism to a crisis whose evolution and scale remain uncertain, and the Cohesion Policy will not be able to cover all the socio-economic consequences of the war, Mr Omarjee and Ms Ferreira confirmed to EUROPE at a press conference.
On the same day, the European Parliament gave a clear and resounding green light to the first CARE initiative (see other news). It should enter into force on 9 April, once the EU Council has adopted it, according to the European Commission’s projections.
The CARE initiative builds directly on the two CRII and CRII+ initiatives that were adopted as emergency measures at the height of the pandemic in 2020 (see EUROPE 12546/18 and 12472/11). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)