Following today's meeting of the College of Commissioners, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen presented the new European economic security strategy. She also spoke about the main aims of the revision of the EU's long-term budget.
President von der Leyen stressed that global integration and open economies were a force for good for Europe, as they were 'good for our competitiveness, and good for our economies'. But she also cautioned that the world had become more contested and geopolitical, making the topic of economic security a priority for the EU and for many of its partners.
"Given the changing nature of the risks, we now need a strategic vision for how we are going to handle these risks. And today, Europe becomes the first major economy to set out a strategy on economic security", she explained, outlining its three policy strands: promoting, protecting, and partnering.
Speaking of promoting the EU's competitiveness, the President quoted many relevant actions that are already taking place, from investing in research through Horizon Europe, to digital transition and upskilling our workforce.
Regarding the protection of the EU from the risks, President von der Leyen stressed the need to be more assertive in using the existing tools, as well as working on targeted new tools, for example on outbound investment.
"Outbound investment means that we need to ensure that European companies' capital, their knowledge, their expertise, their research is not abused by countries of concern for military application. So, we are working on how best to build such an instrument and we will propose an initiative before the end of the year."
Finally, on partnering, the President gave several examples on how to reinforce EU's partnerships on economic security, ranging from bolstering our research cooperation with others, to strengthening our trade relations and supply chains, to diversifying these supply chains.
President von der Leyen also spoke of the proposal of the Commission to reinforce long-term EU budget to face most urgent challenges.
"The world of multiple crises also shows in our budget. We have been using this budget more than ever to be part of the solution of these crises that we saw. We have used every flexibility, every possibility of redeployment. We have reprioritised our funds. And beyond that, we have mobilised every euro we could for Ukraine itself", she said, explaining the reasons behind this budget review.
She said that the Commission's proposal was targeted and limited, focusing on three topics: Ukraine, migration and external challenges, and preserving our competitiveness.
Regarding Ukraine, the Commission has proposed a four-year financial reserve of EUR 50 billion, to provide perspective and predictability for our partners in Ukraine and incentivise other donors to step up too.
Speaking about migration, President von der Leyen underlined the need for urgent, fast responses. "We are proposing to equip our Member States with financial support to strengthen the management of our external border. We need to work more intensively with our neighbourhood to foster their economic development, to stabilise those countries. We need to enhance our international partnerships", she said, adding that EUR 15 billion would be needed to cater to these aspects.
Finally, the third priority concerns the resilience and the competitiveness of the EU's economy. President von der Leyen said that the Commission had identified three sectors of priorities that are critical to preserve our competitive edge - deep tech, clean tech and bio tech and proposed to create STEP (A Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform). For a quick and effective deployment on the ground, this platform would build on and top up existing instruments including InvestEU, the Innovation Fund, the European Innovation Council and the European Defence Fund, while also introducing new flexibilities and incentives for cohesion funding and the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
