During the two-day social summit in Porto, Portugal, topics such as employment promotion, the minimum wage and gender equality, on which participants often have differing views, will be discussed. According to the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, EU countries must take social issues into account when distributing money from the extraordinary reconstruction fund.
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“We must ensure that social aspects are a priority,” the head of the EU executive said at the meeting. According to her, the fund with a total volume of 750 billion euros should contribute, for example, to ensuring that countries take care of people at risk of job loss or poverty. According to her, it will also be important to support retraining and the creation of new jobs as part of the transition to a climate-friendly and digital economy.
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According to the Portuguese Presidency and the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, the representatives of the Member States should support the joint statement after the debate, which calls for a more active role for the EU as a whole in social matters. The aim is to put the so-called European pillar of social rights into practice. However, the set of 20 principles agreed by EU leaders at the previous social summit in Sweden four years ago is still only on paper and many countries do not follow it.
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However, statesmen are cautious in supporting specific plans, and the wording in the proposed text is thus rather general. Countries are divided, for example, in terms of common parameters of the minimum wage or mandatory quotas for the representation of women in the management of large companies.
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“I do not think that one system can fit everyone,” said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for example, when he arrived at the meeting. It was his country, together with Poland, that rejected the wording on “gender equality” in social issues in the forthcoming joint statement of leaders, which has the support of the states of Western and Northern Europe in particular.
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Conservative governments in Warsaw and Budapest are in a long-running dispute with Brussels over, among other things, the role of the family and access to sexual minorities. On Friday, Orbán told reporters that the term was “ideologically motivated” and that he was willing to talk only about equality between men and women.
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The draft joint text is still being negotiated and should not be adopted by leaders until Saturday during the second day of the summit. Its working version envisages that the EU will focus on creating new jobs instead of protecting jobs from the effects of a pandemic. Gross domestic product (GDP) should no longer be the only criterion in assessing economic and social maturity, the proposed text also says.
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Leaders will also discuss on Friday, after the debate on social issues, how to support the start of vaccination in poorer countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which do not yet receive vaccines. They will have a proposal on the table, according to which pharmaceutical companies would temporarily lose their patent rights in order to expand the production of vaccines worldwide as quickly as possible.
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“We Europeans have been fighting for a year to make vaccines a global public domain, and I am happy to have followers,” French President Emmanuel Macron said before the summit. He came across an initiative of hundreds of countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was supported on Wednesday by US President Joe Biden. According to Macron, France is open to the possibility of releasing patents, but the essential condition is to provide the technical background for the production of vaccines in non-European countries.
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The Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš also traveled to the summit. He met with representatives of the Visegrad Four before the event began. According to a government statement, the Prime Minister at the summit “will also take the opportunity to inform his partners about the findings concerning the involvement of Russian secret service agents in the explosions at the ammunition depot in Vrbětice in 2014 and the Czech Republic’s follow-up”.
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