Ricerc@Sapienza

The article focuses on the Next Generation EU as a financial intervention plan prepared by the European Union to tackle the health, economic and social crisis caused by the Covid-19 epidemic. The programs that make up the Next Generation Eu are analyzed, and therefore also the specific aspect of its insertion into the sequence of the European Semester, in the belief that this constitutes an important turning point for the Union, both for the role played by the European Commission in determining the objectives and contents of the policies of the Member States in relation to the Semester, and for the effective expansion and reorientation of the EU guidelines in the view to recovery and resilience. In order to highlight the change in the "political discourse" of the European Commission and therefore of the Union in general, the Annual Growth Surveys for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and the Annual Growth Strategy 2020, drawn up by European Commission at the beginning of the European Semester for the years considered and, for the same purpose, the Country-specific Recommendations addressed to Italy, France, Spain and Germany, for the years 2019 and 2020, were examined. Another topic that it was intended to give rise to from this analysis, is that concerning the notion of a s.c. "useful conditionality", which would emerge from the methods applied by the European Commission in carrying out its monitoring function on the policies adopted by the Member States in connection with the disbursement of loans and grants referred to in the resilience and resilience device. In this context, the issues concerning the proposal to modify the EU's own resources and the proposal on the remodeling of the Union's multiannual financial framework were also brought to attention.