The EU may have to extend resilience plan deadlines

  • Lusa
  • 9 June 2022

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa identified "two types of slippage" in the RPP, one resulting from the war in Ukraine on energy and raw material costs and another arising from the delay in public procurement.

The president of Portugal acknowledged on Thursday that it may be necessary for the European Union to extend the deadline for member states to implement Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRP) if the war in Ukraine drags on.

“Whatever will be discussed is discussed at the European level, and there must be an agreement. I think the war is creating such a different situation that some things will have to change and are changing,” Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told journalists in Braga.

He stressed that “for example, the rules for balancing the budget, financial rules have already been extended for another year” and predicted that “they will probably be another year, and then probably another year, in this provisional regime.

Similarly, “it may be that if the war is prolonged too much, it may conclude that the execution of the PRRs of all the countries needs some slack, needs more time, it may be”.

“But it is all still undefined because, strictly speaking, nobody knows how long the war can last,” he concluded.

In the case of the Portuguese RRP, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa identified “two types of slippage”, one resulting from the war in Ukraine on energy and raw material costs and another arising from the delay in public procurement.

However, he noted that “there are member states much worse than that, there are countries that only now had the RRP approved, so they will only start now or in some time”.

The president was asked about this issue regarding the interview of the minister of the presidency to Rádio Renascença and Público newspaper, in which Mariana Vieira da Silva said that in the European framework, “there is already a discussion on how to deal with the goals of the RRP” taking into account “a significant price increase” and “difficulties in access to some raw materials”.

“It is an inevitable debate, but it does not just a national question. It is not the Portuguese RRP that may suffer implementation risks. It is the context in which we live. It is not a national discussion that stems from a greater difficulty in implementing the RRP”, she said.

Commenting on the words of the minister of the presidency, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said he understood that the government had identified “that slippage” resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February because “the war is lasting, nobody knows for how long, and it is having consequences on the costs of everything”.

“And you don’t know how far the cost can go in a work that takes a year, two years to execute. This is a problem in executing a plan because the plan points to a certain number of works, and suddenly we come to the conclusion that with that money, we cannot do those works, we can do less or part of them, or we have to wait until the cost of execution decreases,” he added.

The president said that everyone loses from the war. “I don’t know how people think it is possible to have a war that touches the whole world and nobody loses,” he noted.

“Even those far away, like us who think we are far away, we are not. We are close. In that sense, as long as the war lasts – and that is why you want to create conditions for peace – we are all losing something,” he reinforced.

In July 2021, when the European bodies approved the Portuguese RRP, the president welcomed this approval and asked that the execution of this plan ensure “maximum use” of European funds with “efficiency and transparency”.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that “he would monitor and contribute to this continuity”.

The RRP commitments must be made until 2023, and the respective expenses executed until 2026.

In October last year, he suggested that a mid-term review of the implementation of the RRP’s European funds should be carried out in 2022.