The NGEU and the Energy Crisis: The Shifting Boundaries of Conditionality

In the NGEU, conditionality has changed, both in its goals, connected with far reaching and ambitious objectives, such as the green and the digital transitions, and in its methodology, based on a dialogic and cooperative approach between the Commission and the Member States. However, these features are already shifting due to the need to answer to the latest crisis that the EU is facing: the energy crisis. As part of the REPowerEU Plan, the Recovery and Resilient Facility (RRF) Regulation has been revised, in order for the States to introduce specific energy chapters. While the use of the RRF to address the energy crisis further consolidates this instrument as the preferential means of financing investments in Member States and the dialogic methodology is confirmed, the types of public interests toward which the use of EU financial resources is to be directed and the balance in the different goals of conditionality continues to evolve, and so do the space for solidarity and the redistributive effects of this tool.