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18 August 2026
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SAFE and Italy’s Hesitation

On 28 July 2026, Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, announced that the government had “decided to use SAFE, requesting an intervention of 14.9 billion euros by the end of the year”. He corrected himself within hours: the 14.9 billion had merely been “booked”. Defence Minister, Guido Crosetto, added that the SAFE decision is a genuinely political choice that the Houses of Parliament will be asked to authorise. Budgetary sovereignty, we argue, is not a residue of national sovereignty to be overcome on the path toward the common defence. Continue reading >>
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15 April 2024

In the Dark

There is an old adage in the world of official transparency that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”. But when it comes to Europe’s recovery transformation via the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) programme and related instruments, the Commission insists on conducting as much of it as possible in the dark. As concerns grow about both the effectiveness and even potentially corruption in the use of recovery funds, this lack of transparency is particularly worrying. Continue reading >>
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28 September 2023

Recovery and Resilience Facility two years after – quo vadis EU money?

In 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis, the EU embarked on a new path. It extensively borrowed money at capital markets and handed it out to member states. After two years of implementation, it is now possible to make some preliminary conclusions about how that money is being spent. Reading the reports and listening to the hearings in the European Parliament, it becomes abundantly clear that most of it has very little to do with European policies. Rather, spending goes into mundane national budgetary expenditures that may be useful as such but have little genuine European value and little transformational potential. In a time with pressing common European needs, this is not how it should be.   Continue reading >>
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