European Council head says Portugal has used EU recovery funds well

Portugal’s former Prime Minister and current President of the European Council, António Costa, has praised Portugal for consistently making the European Commission’s ‘best performance’ list when it comes to executing EU recovery and resilience funds.

In an interview with RTPs Antena 1 this week, António Costa said Portugal had a national problem of “beating itself up” and it was wrong to think that Portugal had not made good use of the Recovery and Resilience funds (RRP).

“The European Commission regularly publishes all the indicators and Portugal is always among the best and has been since 1985”, the said.

The EU considers that Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) appears to be on track. The European Commission has endorsed Portugal’s fifth payment request, indicating that the country has satisfactorily completed the milestones and targets for this implementation. Portugal’s initial RRP, approved by the European Commission in 2021, is a €16.6Bn plan consisting of grants and loans aimed at supporting recovery and strengthening the economy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Now that I live more time overseas than in Portugal, I increasingly appreciate the quality of the services in Portugal, what the Portuguese do and who the Portuguese are,” he said on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Portugal’s entry to the European Economic Community (EEC).

Costa also said it had been a mistake “not to have suspended the RRP during the inflation crisis” which had “penalised its execution” and also expected that the next multi-year plan could not be the same as previous ones.”

“Much of what we introduced in the NextGeneration mechanisms, i.e the RRP, will certainly exist in the next financial framework. What we won’t have is the same execution methodology but will have a lot of the RRP execution methodologies”, he said.

On the European budget, António Costa said that “finally the European Union was viewing housing as an essential policy”.

So, “in the next multi-annual financial framework housing will become eligible, but we don’t know how much by”, the added.