The European Commission’s Priorities for 2019-2024
Source: Unsplash
By Eliza Wojcik, 8 minutes.
From my own experience, I can tell that young people are usually familiar with the European Commission in general and feel confident when asked about it. However, when it comes to the Priorities set by the European Commission every 5 years, all the knowledge and security are suddenly gone. People are not sure what the priorities are, how they were set or how they relate to the core values of the EU. Are you reading this and thinking: this is exactly me? If yes, you are in the right place! Keep reading to get answers to all your questions about the Priorities set by the European Commission for the years 2019-2024.
Priorities – what?
Before discussing the current priorities it is useful to take a moment to look at how priorities are set and how the Commission strategy is carried out. The priorities, in general, are established every 5 years by the Commission President, a position currently occupied by Ursula von der Leyen. The President’s mandate lasts 5 years and this is the time to realise their priorities set at the beginning of the term. However, the priorities are not created completely out of the blue as the Council’s strategic agenda serves as the base for that. Once the priorities are set, the Commission comes up with a plan for the next year where the theoretical priorities are turned into concrete actions. More specifically, each of the departments of the Commission has its own plan to realise the priorities with specific objectives and indicators on how the progress will be monitored and reported. Such plans are regularly sent to other institutions of the European Union to keep the organisation clear. After each year the Commission reports to the European Parliament to present their achievements and further plans.
The specific priorities set by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for the years 2019-2024 are:
A European Green Deal
A Europe fit for the digital age
An economy that works for people
A stronger Europe in the world
Promoting our European way of life
A new push for European democracy
As you may have noticed from the year in which the priorities were drawn up, it was done before the COVID-19 pandemic hit us. As much as it influenced our lives, it also changed the way priorities are to be realised. If you are interested in how the pandemic changed or slowed down the process of implementing the priorities, stay with me, as you can read more about it later in this article! Regarding the titles for current Commission priorities, they sound very promising and seem to cover various areas but let’s unveil what is meant by them.
Source: European Commission
A European Green Deal aims primarily at making the economy of the EU sustainable and being the first climate-neutral continent. By proposing European Climate Law which makes the popular political notion of ‘being sustainable’ into a legal obligation, the Commission wants to achieve no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. The other main objectives are decoupling economic growth from resource use and ensuring that no people or places are left behind. This requires holistic action from all sectors of the economy. It follows naturally that various policy areas are included in this plan such as biodiversity, agriculture, industry, clean energy. The latest press release from 25 March 2021 talks about one of the more interesting aspects of the European Green Deal and explains how the Commission wants to boost organic production. This is to be achieved by the Action Plan which introduces 23 specific actions, which are a topic for a separate article, but which generally revolve around boosting consumption, increasing production and further improving the sustainability of this sector. You can find more information about the details of this Action Plan on the European Commission website. Inevitably, the European Green Deal was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The originally planned activities for 2020 were postponed to start only in 2021. Some say this is a very much needed development in the light of the crisis, but the Vice President of the Commission, Frans Timmermans argues strongly in favour of implementing the actions as planned. According to him, issues like the climate crisis cannot be put aside, because they are as pressing as the COVID-19 crises and constitute an important block for Europe’s future. Seeing that the pandemic has not stopped as I’m writing this, we can only observe what will happen in that area and how the Commission will deal with implementing their priorities in these challenging times.
Source: European Commission
The second priority titled a Europe fit for the digital age aims at making rapid digitalisation friendly and useful for people and businesses while making Europe more digitally sovereign. With this priority, the Commission underlines that the current era should be regarded as Europe’s Digital Decade. Focusing on digital rights and digital principles, this initiative corresponds to the present needs of European citizens. Considering rapid changes in technology and many areas for potential improvement, some of the targets under this priority are to be achieved by 2030 and not 2024 giving the Commission more time to develop the projects.
Source: European Commission
The third priority regards an economy that works for people. As the name suggests, it aims to support and strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises. To achieve this, actions are made on the internal market, by supporting youth employment and by engaging monetary union in it. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the Commission’s plans for this one. Ever since the pandemic struck, people have been struggling to stay at their jobs, get new jobs and earn money to make a living. To protect jobs and incomes in the states affected by the pandemic, the Commission proposed the SURE Programme which provides an additional €3.7 billion for six member states, namely Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta. After helping those countries, which the Council has already approved, there will still be money left to support other states in need, as the Commission proposed to the Council an additional €94.3 for 19 member states, and this proposal now waits to be approved.
Source: European Commission
Another priority focuses on a stronger Europe in the world. Stronger in the sense of Europe being more heard on an international stage and Europe being a more attractive place for business. As the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen herself said:
The world needs our leadership more than ever. To keep engaging with the world as a responsible power. To be a force for peace and for positive change.
In the Commission’s opinion, such developments would ultimately strengthen the EU’s role as a global leader. The Commissioners want to invest in alliances and coalitions in order to advance European values. They aim to promote and protect the interest of Europe by means of open and fair trade. The policy areas involved here are of course foreign policy, trade policy, EU enlargement, humanitarian aid and civil protection.
Source: European Commission
The fifth priority calls for promoting the European way of life. This directly relates to EU core values such as respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law, which are to be encouraged through this priority. It is the current President’s vision to create an equal, tolerant and fair union based on the rule of law. This priority also touches upon the issue of migrations as it aims to give a fresh start to migrants while perfecting and collecting more scrupulously the data ultimately leading to more reliable statistics on migration in Europe.
The very last priority I’m going to talk about is the new push for European democracy. Even though the voter turnout at the 2019 European elections was a record, some people still feel that they need to have a bigger role in the decision-making at the European level. This priority focuses on tightening the Commission relations with the European Parliament and aims to enable people to have a say on Commission initiatives, for example by giving feedback or providing new ideas. There are a lot of plans being developed currently, such as Strategy on the rights of persons with disabilities 2021-2030, European Democracy Action Plan or Conference on the Future of Europe. By such initiatives, the Commission wants to activate and engage the European citizens. In the light of the current wave of Euroscepticism, it is important to notice such developments aiming at including us, citizens of the European Union, in the work of European institutions.
As we are now almost in the middle of the year 2021, this means that the Commission is halfway into realising the priorities and achieving the objectives.
Acknowledging that the pandemic has interrupted the implementation of them in the work of the European institutions, it remains to be seen how the situation will look like after the full five years. I cannot wait to come back to you with a summation article on the priorities assessing their outcome. For now, let’s hope that even though the original plan was interrupted, the Commission will continue its efforts to address these pressing issues which were discussed above. I sincerely hope that this was interesting and educative for you to read and that now you can see why the priorities are so important, as they set the course of the Commission activities which can be in the form of various Action Plans or financial support which positively influence our lives as European citizens.