The Diplomat
The European Commissioner for Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, met yesterday in Madrid with the Spanish Government’s top officials, to whom he expressed his confidence that Spain will “soon” present its request for the disbursement of the 10 billion euros corresponding to the new tranche of the Recovery Plan.
Gentiloni had an intense working day in Madrid yesterday, which began with a meeting with the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, José Luis Escrivá; continued with his participation in a seminar together with the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the First Vice-President and Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño (with whom he later met), and concluded with an interview with the Second Vice-President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz.
During the seminar, entitled Monitoring the recovery: beyond GDP, Sánchez assured that “the whole Government is committed” to the modernization of the labor market (which represents an endorsement of Nadia Calviño, whom Yolanda Díaz has accused of “interference” in this matter) and that the Executive will fulfill its commitment to reform labor legislation, one of the 50 goals negotiated with Brussels in order to receive the 10 billion expected for this year. He also warned that this reform “will be carried out in Spain as it is done in Europe: with social dialogue and a vocation for consensus”.
At the press conference following the seminar, in which Calviño also participated, Gentiloni expressed his confidence that the Spanish government will “soon” formalize the request for the disbursement of 10 billion euros corresponding to a new tranche of the Recovery Fund, because “most of the measures of the plan for the end of the year have already been adopted and that is the reason why the Spanish authorities could be among the first to request the first disbursement”, he declared. “Most of the goals of the Spanish plan have already been implemented and there are other important elements that we will evaluate when we receive the proposed legislation, but we are not worried,” he added.
Spain expects to access €69.5 billion in non-repayable grants over the next six years, half of the €140 billion allocated to Spain in the Next Generation EU recovery plan. According to the timetable envisaged by Brussels, Spain should receive a total of 19 billion this year. The first 9 billion – 13% of the money that corresponds to Spain in subsidies – arrived last August in the form of an advance and an additional disbursement of 10 billion is expected to be approved in the coming weeks, which will depend on the fulfillment of 50 targets agreed by Madrid with Brussels. To receive the 69.5 billion euros in grants, which will be released every six months, Spain will have to meet more than 400 targets. The largest disbursement should arrive in June 2022, with 13.8 billion euros.
With regard to the negotiations for the labor reform, Paolo Gentiloni did not want to enter into Spanish “internal political” controversies and limited himself to recalling that, in its recommendations for Spain, the Commission has warned of the need to address the “segmentation and precariousness” of the labor market and to modernize the collective bargaining system, always in accordance with the principle, present in the recommendations, of seeking a “balance between the security of workers and the flexibility of companies”, which “is neither easy nor automatic”. In any case, he assured that in the Commission “there is no great concern” and it is expected that Spain will comply with the labor reform agreed with the EU within the framework of the Recovery Plan.
