Johan Van Overtveldt: “Restoring employment must now take priority”

“You cannot have serious solidarity without special conditionality.” MEP Johan Van Overtveldt explains his view of the European Economic Recovery Plan. “Restoring employment must now take priority,” he says.

Conditionality rhymes with solidarity

This week, Europe is once again looking at a recovery plan for European states affected by the coronavirus crisis. This European support must always be temporary, transparent and conditional, according to Van Overtveldt. “If you don’t build conditionality in with solidarity, the European Union will be endangered. Then public opinion in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany will certainly oppose it. No one is looking forward to dealing with the AFD, a German right-wing extremist party that is set to receive 30 to 35 per cent of votes. If you are going to work with solidarity without conditionality in Europe, then I’m certain that is where we’re headed.”

Green Deal not central

The idea of putting the Green Deal at the centre of it is not the right idea, according to the N-VA. “We’ve always had a problem with Mr Timmermans’s Green Deal for various reasons. Firstly, there are clear taboos concerning nuclear energy and certain technological innovations. Secondly, they are juggling with the percentages of reduction in CO2 that are to be achieved. A Green Deal with bottlenecks that is supposed to be at the heart of a recovery policy is not right for us. You need a recovery policy the focus of which must be restoring employment. We are naturally arguing in favour of including climate elements in the recovery policy, but the Green Deal in its current state does not have to be the be-all and end-all.”