Join the European Business & Nature Summit on 8-9 December 2020 for two days of stimulating discussion and knowledge exchange on “Green economic recovery – Reshaping business for nature and people”  

The S&D Group today expresses its strong support for the European Commission’s new proposals to strengthen the EU’s health security framework, and to reinforce the crisis preparedness and response role of key EU agencies.  Nevertheless, they also acknowledge that further action is still needed.

Today, during the plenary debate on terrorism, the right to freedom of expression and education, the leader of the Socialists and Democrats, Iratxe García Pérez said:

“The recent terrorist attacks in France and in Austria fill us with sadness and our thoughts and solidarity are with all the victims and their families. But terrorists will never win in their fight to undermine our democracies founded on freedom and openness. On the contrary: we will fight them with our principles.

Today, the economic committee in the European Parliament votes on targeted amendments to the EU’s securitisation framework adopted in 2017, which comprises the Securitisation Regulation and the Capital Requirements Regulation. The Commission’s proposals aim at enhancing banks’ lending capacity by making it easier to transfer credit risk to markets and to free their balance sheets from the burden of non-performing loans, which are expected to grow due to the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Socialists and Democrats in the committees on budget and economic affairs spearheaded an agreement, in a committee vote today, on the future of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

The RRF is the fund that will help member states recover from the Covid-19 crisis, by means of shared EU debt provided in the form of grants and loans, according to each country’s needs, based on their own national Recovery and Resilience Plans.