Federal Challenges in the Implementation of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility in Germany.

Abstract

The paper focuses on the internal implementation process of the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in Germany with special regard to the participation of the Länder in the development of the plan and its priorities. We argue that the course of the development and implementation process is illustrating how national executives can pursue their own goals by exploiting the blindness of the EU and its treaties to federal systems. This was favored by the fact that the European Commission (EC) labeled its Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) including NextGeneration EU (NGEU) as a “stimulus package”. The coincidence of these two reasons allowed the German government to develop its own Recovery and Resilience Plan without major consultation. Moreover, the decades-long disputes between the federal government and the states, in which the latter had gained considerable information and voice, do not seem to have taken place. Since the RRF can be interpreted as a new cohesion policy approach of the EU, stronger involvement of the German Länder and municipalities in the negotiation process of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (DARP) would have been essential. The analysis exemplifies aspects of multilevel governance that need to be strengthened if the EU is to expand its economic policy instruments in the future.