News

EU economic integration will be an overarching principle of the new European Commission, with all portfolios revolving around it. However, I feel that efforts to alleviate what was described as a “social emergency” by the previous Commission did not get the same boost in the new list of priorities.

The new legislative and political initiatives of the Commission are economically oriented. For example, in the first three months the President-elect wants several Commissioners to present a “jobs, growth and investment package”. He also wants “legislative and non-legislative initiatives to deepen our economic and monetary unions and a regulatory framework to ensure the resilience and stability of the financial services sector”. These are new initiatives and they have to be frontloaded now.

When it comes to the social field, it is not as easy to pinpoint initiatives that will boost the social dimension of the European project. The anti-discrimination directive has been on the negotiating table since 2008. It would be great if we could finally get it adopted, but it is by no means a new initiative. Ensuring that every Commission proposal complies with the Charter of Fundamental Rights is a Treaty obligation. Again, this is a great step, and indeed our member ILGA-Europe welcomed it, but it is certainly not new. There will also be the accession to the European Convention on Human Rights which was progressed during the Barroso II mandate. I did not find in the President-elect's mission letter to the Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility any mention of the need to work towards consensus on minimum wage and minimum income, despite his vow to push forward these initiatives in his address to the European Parliament on July 15. Let’s hope he does not backtrack on the opportunity to take this huge step forward in the social field.

Concerning to me is the possibility that we have lost what little focus on social issues we won in the previous Commission; where is the emphasis on “inclusion” in the portfolio of Commissioner Thyssen, when one in four Europeans experience poverty? Will the investment package to be presented in the first three months of the mandate include a “social package”, as we have been promoting for two years? Why has the responsibility for health technology and pharmaceutical policy been reassigned to Internal Market instead of Health and Food Safety, asks our member the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA)? In the past, the link between health technology, pharmaceutical policy and the Commission’s Health portfolio was meant to facilitate emergency preparedness.

For now, these questions remain unanswered; we will have a clearer idea of the direction the new Commission is heading in the coming weeks. By the end of this month all Commissioners will have been heard by Members of the European Parliament, and, if the whole College receives a positive vote from Parliament, it will take up its mandate in November.

We cannot prejudge the work of the Commission; the questions raised by our members are nonetheless legitimate. It might be a “new” Commission, but it has to live with the legacy of its predecessor. One thing is clear from the last mandate – you cannot do the economics without touching on the social, as so many of us witness every day. The sooner we accept that, the better. Only then can we work on an economic policy that benefits the social element too, i.e. European citizens. Barroso’s Commission may have left us, but Europe’s “social emergency” has not.

Let’s engage,

Pierre Baussand, Director