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The informal summit of EU heads of state and government in Budapest at the end of next week will probably be the last for outgoing Council President Charles Michel. Before he hands over his office to António Costa at the beginning of December, the Belgian will be shaking up the preparations once again.
Usually, the Council President first presents the EU ambassadors with a rough outline of the final declaration. This time, however, Michel has drawn up a detailed, nine-page draft text. His proposal for the “Budapest Declaration” on the competitiveness of the EU is peppered with concrete demands. Michel wants to give the discussion another boost, said his head of cabinet in the circle of EU ambassadors.
However, Michel has opened a Pandora’s box, says an EU diplomat. This is because the wording in the declaration is hardly acceptable to the member states for very different reasons: The frugal countries do not want to read anything about new pots of money such as a sovereignty fund in it, the net beneficiary countries defend the cohesion funds, the “friends of nuclear power” demand clearer words on the subject, etc.
Despite hours of discussions, the ambassadors have therefore only been able to agree on a few things so far. Time is running out until the summit, which will be preceded on Thursday by a meeting with the neighboring states within the framework of the European Political Community: Only two more meetings of the ambassadors are scheduled, on Monday and Wednesday. However, the member states basically agreed that the “Budapest Declaration” should be shorter and more political, i.e. leave more room for formulaic compromises. But Michel is resisting this.
It is not the first time that the Council President has complicated the summit discussions with his ambition instead of facilitating compromises, much to the annoyance of his colleagues. However, the debate with Mario Draghi on competitiveness on Friday morning may be overshadowed by the outcome of the US presidential election anyway. The heads of state and government want to discuss the consequences of this for the EU over dinner on Thursday evening. However, depending on the state of the count and the apparent winner of the election, the discussion could take up even more space.
I wish you a wonderful weekend!
The hearings start on Monday (Nov. 4) and run until Tuesday the following week (Nov. 12). They start either at 9 a.m., 2:30 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. and last 180 minutes. With two parallel hearings, a maximum of six Commissioners will be heard in one day. The hearings will take place in Brussels in rooms 2Q2 and 4Q2 in the ANTALL building of the EU Parliament – but there will also be a livestream on the Parliament’s website.
The supposedly most important hearings take place on the last day: This is when Parliament will examine the six designated Executive Vice-Presidents of the Commission.
The candidates are heard by one or more of the relevant committees. Depending on their technical relevance, other committees may be invited to ask oral questions, but are not entitled to vote.
The first 15 minutes belong to the designated commissioners for an opening statement, after which the question and answer session begins. Each political group is allocated a certain amount of time for the questions, which it divides up among its members. The Commissioners-designate have twice as much time as the MEPs to answer their questions. Finally, the candidates can make another statement.
The assessment of the designated Commissioners takes place directly after the hearings. The committee coordinators of the political groups in the relevant committee or committees assess in a non-public meeting whether the candidates are suitable for the tasks assigned to them. A two-thirds majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators is required to approve or reject a candidate.
Within 24 hours of completing the assessment, the coordinators submit a confidential letter of recommendation. This is first reviewed by the Conference of Committee Chairs and then forwarded to the Conference of Presidents (CoP) for further processing. As soon as the CoP has processed all the hearings, the evaluation letters are published.
If a two-thirds majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators is not achieved, further written questions can be submitted or a further 90-minute hearing can be scheduled. Both options require a simple majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators.
If a simple majority of the coordinators cannot be reached either, the appointment of the commissioner is voted on by secret ballot among all committee members. A simple majority is sufficient. However, there are also agreements not to go into extra time at all if there is no two-thirds majority, but to jump to the end of the procedure immediately after the 180-minute hearing and let the committees vote. According to information available to Table.Briefings, these considerations have already been legally examined.
The coordinators also have the option of requesting changes to the portfolio or the role within the Commission. It is then up to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whether she complies with the request in order to prevent the candidate from being rejected.
If the committee coordinators decide by a two-thirds majority to reject an applicant, the respective member state must present an alternative candidate. This candidate would then also be subject to a new hearing, which would first have to be scheduled. The appointment of the new Commissioners would therefore be delayed, as Parliament will vote on the entire personnel tableau. The planned start date of the new Commission on Dec. 1 would not be possible.
If a member state refuses to nominate a new candidate, the Commission can initiate infringement proceedings to force the country to make a nomination.
The Hungarian Commissioner candidate Olivér Várhelyi is the most endangered. The Commissioner-designate for Health is considered a red flag by many MEPs, not least after he once described MEPs as “idiots”. The Social Democrats, Greens and Left are likely to reject him outright, and the EPP is also critical of Várhelyi. One slip-up in the hearing and the Hungarian will have a hard time. However, it remains to be seen who from Budapest will take his place and how long a subsequent nomination by Viktor Orbán would slow down the process.
There could be a real “shootout” on the last day of hearings with the executive vice-presidents. Should the Social Democrats and Liberals decide to block the Italian Raffaele Fitto, they would prevent a two-thirds majority in the REGI Committee. However, the EPP, which supports the ECR candidate Fitto, would also have to vote with the right-wingers of PfE and ESN in order to get the Italian through. If the EPP decides against making common cause with the right and accepts Fitto’s blockade, it could also block the Social Democrat Teresa Ribera and the Liberal Stéphane Séjourné as a retaliatory measure. The motto in the last talks before the hearings next week is therefore: either all or none of the three.
As Fitto’s critics are particularly bothered by his title as Executive Vice-President, a compromise could be to strip him of this title and simply make him Cohesion Commissioner. This would be in von der Leyen’s hands. However, it is questionable whether the Commission President will agree to this, as it would anger Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
It is currently planned that the vote on the entire personnel table of the new Commission will take place in Strasbourg on Nov. 27. If the EU Parliament agrees, the new Commissioners will be officially appointed by the Council by a qualified majority. The new Commissioners would then take office on Dec. 1.
If it becomes clear as early as next week that Donald Trump will win the US election, this will also have a direct impact on the hearings of the EU Commissioners. Transatlantic relations, measures against tariffs announced by Trump and the future of support for Ukraine would inevitably find their way into the Commissioner candidates’ question and answer sessions.
The selection of the first strategic raw materials projects on the basis of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) has been delayed. According to the new schedule, the process will take until mid-March 2025 instead of December at the latest, as originally planned by the EU Commission, Table.Briefings has learned.
“Due to the high number of applications submitted, the Commission has indeed revised the original timeframe for processing all applications,” explained a Commission spokesperson. 170 applications had been received by the deadline of Aug. 22 – the Commission had originally expected around 50 applications. It is not yet clear how many projects will actually be selected in the end.
According to information available to Table.Briefings, the review of the applications only began in October; the Commission intends to present a preliminary selection at the beginning of February 2025. The final decision is to be made by March 15.
In 2023, the CRMA was negotiated and adopted in a rush. This is because the EU has so far been heavily dependent on imports, particularly from China, for the supply of strategically important raw materials for the energy transition and digitalization, such as lithium and nickel for electric vehicle batteries. The law is intended to regulate and incentivize the development of mining, processing and recycling capacities in the EU and thus promote the domestic production and import diversification of raw materials.
Strategic projects are given priority for approval by the authorities: For mining projects, for example, the approval process must not take longer than 27 months, and for processing and recycling projects no longer than 15 months. The projects are also legally in the “overriding public interest”, which makes it more difficult to raise objections in court on the grounds of environmental or monument protection.
The then rapporteur in the EU Parliament, Nicola Beer, had promised that the first strategic projects would be selected in summer 2024. However, the pace of implementation is now lagging behind the speed of the legislative process.
Almost three-quarters of the project applications received by the Commission by August came from the EU, while around a quarter were submitted by partner countries from outside the EU. According to information Table.Briefings has obtained, 13 of the applications came from Germany, including projects from all four stages of the value chain.
The Commission was not prepared for the high number of applications, criticizes Hildegard Bentele, EPP MEP, who helped negotiate the CRMA. She has just been appointed as Parliament’s representative on the Critical Raw Materials Board, which advises the EU Commission on project selection and serves as an exchange platform for the member states. The first working meeting will take place in November; the work of the subgroups has already begun.
According to Bentele, the extension of the selection process is now necessary in order to be able to sufficiently review each application. “The delay is of course annoying – especially for the projects that are still in the financing phase and need planning security”, she told Table.Briefings. “However, the postponement is also an expression of the success of the Raw Materials Act, as the unexpectedly high number of applications shows that we have struck a nerve.”
“We need much more speed”, demands Anne Lauenroth, Deputy Head of the Raw Materials Department at the Federation of German Industries (BDI). “The development of European raw material capacities, which should actually be a top priority with a view to reducing our dependencies, is slowing down.”
Michael Reckordt, raw materials policy officer at the NGO Powershift, criticizes the lack of transparency in the selection process: It is not clear how the EU Commission applies the criteria – i.e. whether it gives greater weight to security of supply or the goal of having as many projects as possible than to social and environmental criteria.
“As civil society, we only receive information on applications via the companies’ social media pages“, he explains. “The EU Commission, on the other hand, is completely non-transparent.” This prevents other stakeholders from providing further information on individual projects. “The evaluation of the projects seems to be based on the companies’ submissions. This further undermines public acceptance of these projects”, says Reckordt.
From his perspective, there is also a lack of neutral experts: “There is a justified suspicion that many experts work or have worked for the mining industry and therefore have a conflict of interest.” He explains that this increases the risk of looking less closely at ecological and social issues in particular and writing reports for the benefit of others.
Lauenroth believes it makes sense to involve experts from the industry as well: “The criterion of security of supply should be the focus when selecting strategic projects”, she says.
Josef Síkela, a former Czech banker, is to become Commissioner for International Partnerships in the new mandate. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already drafted a mission letter for him in which she describes a fundamental change of course for the EU’s development policy.
In order to establish the desired “new economic foreign policy”, funding for the Global Gateway Initiative is to be increased. The focus here is on Europe’s own economic interests. A concept, according to the interpretation, that also corresponds to the desire of developing countries for more economic prosperity. With his professional background, Jozef Síkela, who has successfully risen through the ranks at the Austrian Erste Gruppe, seems tailor-made for the job.
Even today, an increasing proportion of the €79.5 billion seven-year pot for development partnerships is earmarked for global gateway projects. However, a recent study by Oxfam, Counterbalance and Eurodad concludes that the successes to date are questionable, both economically and in terms of development policy.
There is no doubt that infrastructure investments play a crucial role in promoting inclusive growth, reducing poverty and reducing inequalities in many developing countries. However, not all investments are always beneficial for all, as the glaring inequality of wealth distribution and the progressive impoverishment of large parts of the Global South underline.
Instead of repeating old mistakes and relying on supposed trickle-down successes, an honest discussion should therefore focus on the following questions:
Does the proclaimed investment orientation actually lead to a deepening of sustainable value chains in the partner countries or does it merely conceal the North’s hunger for critical raw materials against the current geopolitical backdrop? A strategy that is seriously oriented towards mutual benefit will hardly be possible without strengthening the key factors of education and health. Collective goods for the benefit of broad sections of the population, combating climate change and inequality are the only way to achieve social success and stability through private and public investment. Both are urgently needed prerequisites for enabling independent and sustainable development.
Will the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy remain the central compass needle that becomes more effective with Global Gateway or does the “new economic foreign policy” herald a departure from it? The answer to this question cannot be given by verbal commitments. It is inherent in the conception of the project lines and the modalities of their implementation. Are the projects compatible in terms of self-sustaining development in our partner countries, are civil society actors sufficiently involved and is there – in addition to the influential Business Advisory Group consisting of company representatives – a strengthening of previously marginalized parliamentary participation?
Good partnership work must be measured by its results. The outgoing EU Commission has therefore already established instruments – in particular the Inequality Marker – which help to ensure that investments benefit the weaker sections of the population. These mechanisms must be strengthened and expanded, not least because the measurability of results is in the legitimate interests of EU citizens.
If Síkela is to be successful, Global Gateway 2.0 needs a conceptual orientation geared towards a sustainable future, more transparency and more democratic participation procedures. Only then would such an approach really help the EU to make its mark in the Global South in a geopolitical context. Instead of emulating China’s influence with a European copy, Europe would play out its comparative advantages where they lie: in the promotion of social progress based on self-reliance, inclusive growth and social participation – values of our European social model that continue to stand for hope and expectation in large parts of the world.
The informal summit of EU heads of state and government in Budapest at the end of next week will probably be the last for outgoing Council President Charles Michel. Before he hands over his office to António Costa at the beginning of December, the Belgian will be shaking up the preparations once again.
Usually, the Council President first presents the EU ambassadors with a rough outline of the final declaration. This time, however, Michel has drawn up a detailed, nine-page draft text. His proposal for the “Budapest Declaration” on the competitiveness of the EU is peppered with concrete demands. Michel wants to give the discussion another boost, said his head of cabinet in the circle of EU ambassadors.
However, Michel has opened a Pandora’s box, says an EU diplomat. This is because the wording in the declaration is hardly acceptable to the member states for very different reasons: The frugal countries do not want to read anything about new pots of money such as a sovereignty fund in it, the net beneficiary countries defend the cohesion funds, the “friends of nuclear power” demand clearer words on the subject, etc.
Despite hours of discussions, the ambassadors have therefore only been able to agree on a few things so far. Time is running out until the summit, which will be preceded on Thursday by a meeting with the neighboring states within the framework of the European Political Community: Only two more meetings of the ambassadors are scheduled, on Monday and Wednesday. However, the member states basically agreed that the “Budapest Declaration” should be shorter and more political, i.e. leave more room for formulaic compromises. But Michel is resisting this.
It is not the first time that the Council President has complicated the summit discussions with his ambition instead of facilitating compromises, much to the annoyance of his colleagues. However, the debate with Mario Draghi on competitiveness on Friday morning may be overshadowed by the outcome of the US presidential election anyway. The heads of state and government want to discuss the consequences of this for the EU over dinner on Thursday evening. However, depending on the state of the count and the apparent winner of the election, the discussion could take up even more space.
I wish you a wonderful weekend!
The hearings start on Monday (Nov. 4) and run until Tuesday the following week (Nov. 12). They start either at 9 a.m., 2:30 p.m. or 6:30 p.m. and last 180 minutes. With two parallel hearings, a maximum of six Commissioners will be heard in one day. The hearings will take place in Brussels in rooms 2Q2 and 4Q2 in the ANTALL building of the EU Parliament – but there will also be a livestream on the Parliament’s website.
The supposedly most important hearings take place on the last day: This is when Parliament will examine the six designated Executive Vice-Presidents of the Commission.
The candidates are heard by one or more of the relevant committees. Depending on their technical relevance, other committees may be invited to ask oral questions, but are not entitled to vote.
The first 15 minutes belong to the designated commissioners for an opening statement, after which the question and answer session begins. Each political group is allocated a certain amount of time for the questions, which it divides up among its members. The Commissioners-designate have twice as much time as the MEPs to answer their questions. Finally, the candidates can make another statement.
The assessment of the designated Commissioners takes place directly after the hearings. The committee coordinators of the political groups in the relevant committee or committees assess in a non-public meeting whether the candidates are suitable for the tasks assigned to them. A two-thirds majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators is required to approve or reject a candidate.
Within 24 hours of completing the assessment, the coordinators submit a confidential letter of recommendation. This is first reviewed by the Conference of Committee Chairs and then forwarded to the Conference of Presidents (CoP) for further processing. As soon as the CoP has processed all the hearings, the evaluation letters are published.
If a two-thirds majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators is not achieved, further written questions can be submitted or a further 90-minute hearing can be scheduled. Both options require a simple majority of the committee members represented by the coordinators.
If a simple majority of the coordinators cannot be reached either, the appointment of the commissioner is voted on by secret ballot among all committee members. A simple majority is sufficient. However, there are also agreements not to go into extra time at all if there is no two-thirds majority, but to jump to the end of the procedure immediately after the 180-minute hearing and let the committees vote. According to information available to Table.Briefings, these considerations have already been legally examined.
The coordinators also have the option of requesting changes to the portfolio or the role within the Commission. It is then up to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whether she complies with the request in order to prevent the candidate from being rejected.
If the committee coordinators decide by a two-thirds majority to reject an applicant, the respective member state must present an alternative candidate. This candidate would then also be subject to a new hearing, which would first have to be scheduled. The appointment of the new Commissioners would therefore be delayed, as Parliament will vote on the entire personnel tableau. The planned start date of the new Commission on Dec. 1 would not be possible.
If a member state refuses to nominate a new candidate, the Commission can initiate infringement proceedings to force the country to make a nomination.
The Hungarian Commissioner candidate Olivér Várhelyi is the most endangered. The Commissioner-designate for Health is considered a red flag by many MEPs, not least after he once described MEPs as “idiots”. The Social Democrats, Greens and Left are likely to reject him outright, and the EPP is also critical of Várhelyi. One slip-up in the hearing and the Hungarian will have a hard time. However, it remains to be seen who from Budapest will take his place and how long a subsequent nomination by Viktor Orbán would slow down the process.
There could be a real “shootout” on the last day of hearings with the executive vice-presidents. Should the Social Democrats and Liberals decide to block the Italian Raffaele Fitto, they would prevent a two-thirds majority in the REGI Committee. However, the EPP, which supports the ECR candidate Fitto, would also have to vote with the right-wingers of PfE and ESN in order to get the Italian through. If the EPP decides against making common cause with the right and accepts Fitto’s blockade, it could also block the Social Democrat Teresa Ribera and the Liberal Stéphane Séjourné as a retaliatory measure. The motto in the last talks before the hearings next week is therefore: either all or none of the three.
As Fitto’s critics are particularly bothered by his title as Executive Vice-President, a compromise could be to strip him of this title and simply make him Cohesion Commissioner. This would be in von der Leyen’s hands. However, it is questionable whether the Commission President will agree to this, as it would anger Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
It is currently planned that the vote on the entire personnel table of the new Commission will take place in Strasbourg on Nov. 27. If the EU Parliament agrees, the new Commissioners will be officially appointed by the Council by a qualified majority. The new Commissioners would then take office on Dec. 1.
If it becomes clear as early as next week that Donald Trump will win the US election, this will also have a direct impact on the hearings of the EU Commissioners. Transatlantic relations, measures against tariffs announced by Trump and the future of support for Ukraine would inevitably find their way into the Commissioner candidates’ question and answer sessions.
The selection of the first strategic raw materials projects on the basis of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) has been delayed. According to the new schedule, the process will take until mid-March 2025 instead of December at the latest, as originally planned by the EU Commission, Table.Briefings has learned.
“Due to the high number of applications submitted, the Commission has indeed revised the original timeframe for processing all applications,” explained a Commission spokesperson. 170 applications had been received by the deadline of Aug. 22 – the Commission had originally expected around 50 applications. It is not yet clear how many projects will actually be selected in the end.
According to information available to Table.Briefings, the review of the applications only began in October; the Commission intends to present a preliminary selection at the beginning of February 2025. The final decision is to be made by March 15.
In 2023, the CRMA was negotiated and adopted in a rush. This is because the EU has so far been heavily dependent on imports, particularly from China, for the supply of strategically important raw materials for the energy transition and digitalization, such as lithium and nickel for electric vehicle batteries. The law is intended to regulate and incentivize the development of mining, processing and recycling capacities in the EU and thus promote the domestic production and import diversification of raw materials.
Strategic projects are given priority for approval by the authorities: For mining projects, for example, the approval process must not take longer than 27 months, and for processing and recycling projects no longer than 15 months. The projects are also legally in the “overriding public interest”, which makes it more difficult to raise objections in court on the grounds of environmental or monument protection.
The then rapporteur in the EU Parliament, Nicola Beer, had promised that the first strategic projects would be selected in summer 2024. However, the pace of implementation is now lagging behind the speed of the legislative process.
Almost three-quarters of the project applications received by the Commission by August came from the EU, while around a quarter were submitted by partner countries from outside the EU. According to information Table.Briefings has obtained, 13 of the applications came from Germany, including projects from all four stages of the value chain.
The Commission was not prepared for the high number of applications, criticizes Hildegard Bentele, EPP MEP, who helped negotiate the CRMA. She has just been appointed as Parliament’s representative on the Critical Raw Materials Board, which advises the EU Commission on project selection and serves as an exchange platform for the member states. The first working meeting will take place in November; the work of the subgroups has already begun.
According to Bentele, the extension of the selection process is now necessary in order to be able to sufficiently review each application. “The delay is of course annoying – especially for the projects that are still in the financing phase and need planning security”, she told Table.Briefings. “However, the postponement is also an expression of the success of the Raw Materials Act, as the unexpectedly high number of applications shows that we have struck a nerve.”
“We need much more speed”, demands Anne Lauenroth, Deputy Head of the Raw Materials Department at the Federation of German Industries (BDI). “The development of European raw material capacities, which should actually be a top priority with a view to reducing our dependencies, is slowing down.”
Michael Reckordt, raw materials policy officer at the NGO Powershift, criticizes the lack of transparency in the selection process: It is not clear how the EU Commission applies the criteria – i.e. whether it gives greater weight to security of supply or the goal of having as many projects as possible than to social and environmental criteria.
“As civil society, we only receive information on applications via the companies’ social media pages“, he explains. “The EU Commission, on the other hand, is completely non-transparent.” This prevents other stakeholders from providing further information on individual projects. “The evaluation of the projects seems to be based on the companies’ submissions. This further undermines public acceptance of these projects”, says Reckordt.
From his perspective, there is also a lack of neutral experts: “There is a justified suspicion that many experts work or have worked for the mining industry and therefore have a conflict of interest.” He explains that this increases the risk of looking less closely at ecological and social issues in particular and writing reports for the benefit of others.
Lauenroth believes it makes sense to involve experts from the industry as well: “The criterion of security of supply should be the focus when selecting strategic projects”, she says.
Josef Síkela, a former Czech banker, is to become Commissioner for International Partnerships in the new mandate. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has already drafted a mission letter for him in which she describes a fundamental change of course for the EU’s development policy.
In order to establish the desired “new economic foreign policy”, funding for the Global Gateway Initiative is to be increased. The focus here is on Europe’s own economic interests. A concept, according to the interpretation, that also corresponds to the desire of developing countries for more economic prosperity. With his professional background, Jozef Síkela, who has successfully risen through the ranks at the Austrian Erste Gruppe, seems tailor-made for the job.
Even today, an increasing proportion of the €79.5 billion seven-year pot for development partnerships is earmarked for global gateway projects. However, a recent study by Oxfam, Counterbalance and Eurodad concludes that the successes to date are questionable, both economically and in terms of development policy.
There is no doubt that infrastructure investments play a crucial role in promoting inclusive growth, reducing poverty and reducing inequalities in many developing countries. However, not all investments are always beneficial for all, as the glaring inequality of wealth distribution and the progressive impoverishment of large parts of the Global South underline.
Instead of repeating old mistakes and relying on supposed trickle-down successes, an honest discussion should therefore focus on the following questions:
Does the proclaimed investment orientation actually lead to a deepening of sustainable value chains in the partner countries or does it merely conceal the North’s hunger for critical raw materials against the current geopolitical backdrop? A strategy that is seriously oriented towards mutual benefit will hardly be possible without strengthening the key factors of education and health. Collective goods for the benefit of broad sections of the population, combating climate change and inequality are the only way to achieve social success and stability through private and public investment. Both are urgently needed prerequisites for enabling independent and sustainable development.
Will the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy remain the central compass needle that becomes more effective with Global Gateway or does the “new economic foreign policy” herald a departure from it? The answer to this question cannot be given by verbal commitments. It is inherent in the conception of the project lines and the modalities of their implementation. Are the projects compatible in terms of self-sustaining development in our partner countries, are civil society actors sufficiently involved and is there – in addition to the influential Business Advisory Group consisting of company representatives – a strengthening of previously marginalized parliamentary participation?
Good partnership work must be measured by its results. The outgoing EU Commission has therefore already established instruments – in particular the Inequality Marker – which help to ensure that investments benefit the weaker sections of the population. These mechanisms must be strengthened and expanded, not least because the measurability of results is in the legitimate interests of EU citizens.
If Síkela is to be successful, Global Gateway 2.0 needs a conceptual orientation geared towards a sustainable future, more transparency and more democratic participation procedures. Only then would such an approach really help the EU to make its mark in the Global South in a geopolitical context. Instead of emulating China’s influence with a European copy, Europe would play out its comparative advantages where they lie: in the promotion of social progress based on self-reliance, inclusive growth and social participation – values of our European social model that continue to stand for hope and expectation in large parts of the world.