For the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, “miracles only happen if you believe in miracles.” This week, the EU institutions set the scene for two miracles in the same city. The most Eurosceptic will easily find some correlations between EU developments and miracles, but this time may be more difficult to argue against the evidence.
The first miracle had a top reliable sponsor in Pope Francis. Last Tuesday, when addressing the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he did not only succeed to attract an unusual fully packed audience of MEPs. More profoundly, in one of the most political speech I have heard over the last twenty-five years in the hemicycle, the pope succeeded to move and shake the EU establishment toward a renewed engagement for a better Europe. One that is able to rediscover its core founding values of human dignity, solidarity and fundamental people’s rights, rather than embodying a technocratic model that generate mistrust and suspicion.
Meanwhile, the non-complacent analysis shared by the first non-European pope after eight centuries went beyond a wake-up call to EU policy-makers and the broader community of EU stakeholders. Pope Francis’ address resonated more as a call for the Europeans to regain confidence in their capacity to overcome the current anxiety and pursue the ideal of a united and peaceful Europe, escaping the narrow individualistic interest.
The second miracle has been driven by the European Commission’s President Jean-Claude Juncker outlining the creation of a new European Fund for Strategic Investments, guaranteed for 21 billion euro by the EU budget and by the European Investment Bank (EIB). The ultimate objective is to mobilise 15 times the EU guarantee by attracting private and public investment of at least 315 billion euros.
The fund should focus on investment in infrastructure, targeting in particular projects for broadband and energy networks, urban transport, renewable energy, education and training, and funding for SMEs and middle capitalisation companies. The fund will have a dedicated investment committee made up of experts that will have to validate every project from a commercial and societal perspective and based on the value-added that each project can bring to the EU as a whole.
Next mid-December the Commission and the EIB task force are expected to present a first list of possible investments, while the European Council of 18-19 December will be invited to approve the investment plan, due to last three years from mid-2015, the forecast date for the plan to become operational.
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The true miracle is not the proposed establishment of the investment fund, although there are some parallelism there with Jesus’s miracle of the “multiplication of the loaves and fishes” that in the case of the fund has a long way to go. The true miracle is rather a specific clause that would be included in the set-up of the fund allowing the exclusion of the related national contribution to finance new projects from the growth and stability pact rules on public debt. An approach that would open the way to some form of flexibility in EU budget rules. On this same issue of budget rules, further evidence of the new political course inaugurated by President Juncker is given this week by the Commission’s decision to recognize the benefit from an economic perspective of the ambitious plan of reforms put forward by Italy and refrain from opening the cumbersome procedure for excessive deficit at least until spring of next year.
Meanwhile, there were no miracles to register in Brussels on the front of EU Member States effective compliance with EU law. The monthly package adopted by the European Commission this week, pursuing legal action against Member States for failing to comply properly with their obligations under EU law, included 205 decisions covering a wide range of sectors spanning from taxation to environment.