Making Next Generation EU a permanent tool

The policy study assesses the possible scope and the technical and legal difficulties in implementing a "permanent Next-Generation EU (NGEU)", a central fiscal capacity for the EU, without ever losing sight of the democratic requirement. The implementation of NGEU has raised coordination issues between the member states as to the allocation of funds across structural priorities (e.g. ecological transition vs digitalisation) and across countries. To these coordination difficulties, Section 2 adds the issue of the democratic legitimacy of EU policies when supranational priorities constrain the autonomy of national parliaments. The problem of accountability is not new when one thinks that supranational rules, such as the Stability and Growth Pact, impose limits on the power of parliaments to "tax and spend"; in fact, the intrinsic logic of coordination is to force (political) discretionary power to comply with (macroeconomic) functional imperatives; this inevitably produces a form of depoliticisation of fiscal policy. Throughout this policy study, we constantly keep in mind that transforming NGEU into a permanent programme offers an opportunity to fix this depoliticisation of EU policies and open a window for a breakthrough to a "political Europe".