The pandemic hasn’t just brought a massive loss of life but also a historic economic downturn — including in Spain. The year 2020 saw the country’s economy shrink 10.8 percent, with unemployment surging above 4 million and public debt reaching 120 percent of GDP, as a result of efforts to sustain the economy and maintain social benefits and services. Here, as across the European Union (EU), this poses the question of whether the bloc’s Next Generation EU (NGEU) funds will resolve the crisis — or end up deepening it.

Indeed, the EU’s past crisis response measures aren’t memorable for positive reasons. We need only think back to the unpopular austerity imposed on Greece — or, in Spain itself, how Article 135 of the Constitution was amended to prioritize debt interest payments over social investment.

Yet, faced with the pandemic, the EU has outwardly dispensed with austerity dogma, for now at least. It has done so with a view to avoiding more severe repercussions for not only the EU economy but the economies of the individual member states — and shifting Europe’s growth model toward a green economy and digital transformation.