"The true nature of the Next Generation EU programme has nothing to do with the recurring image that the economic and political effort made has not been as important as the aid of other powers; the win-win story of the sweet transition has exploded as military conflicts rise; the development of the programme, supposedly urgent and strategic, opaque and slow, in practice, the public effort to keep the programme desperate. Green and digital agenda for transnational companies. Impact study of Next Generation EU funds in Hego Euskal Herria (2020-2024). At the request of ELA, OMAL was drafted by the Observatory of Latin American Multinationals and presented on 28 May.

Next Generation EU (NGEU) was the first tool to realise the green and digital wager on the European agenda, launched in 2021. The UN has been a centralized process in which the state reserves the most strategic investments and the autonomous communities are responsible for the secondary calls. The report details that the NGEU process is a "Bermuda Triangle": social counter-measures, investments of doubtful viability, increased debt and speculative appropriation of bubbles and public funds. The conclusion is clear to the Latin American and ELA Multinational Observatory: "The NGEU program was a mermaid song whose sound has lost strength." The report contains the elements to refute the win-win story of what the investments would be for the benefit of all.

Instead of transforming the economic matrix, the traditional social counter-reforms, austerity policies and the development of corporate investments are the obligations of the European Union in the territories, and in this case in Hego Euskal Herria. In fact, states have an obligation to guide anti-social policies and austerity measures in the exchange of subsidies. "The working class is undergoing labour reform, pension reform and tax reform, as well as the dissolution of public procurement criteria; the increase in debt at all levels suggests a bold future."

Austerity and counter-forms

As ELA Secretary General Mitxel Lakuntza pointed out at a press conference, these funds oblige the Government of Spain to set reductions in pensions of 6.1% from April 2025, of €11.3 billion per year: "European funds are intervention mechanisms in state policies and are granted within the framework of austerity policies that the European Union has been implementing for some time. The parties that led to pension reform, including PNV and EH Bildu, are also responsible for this situation. They asked the institutions to reject the reform that turned their backs on it." Moreover, it can be read that these policies benefit the strategy and the war economy: "Higher military spending and lower social spending. They want to reduce pensions to buy weapons, that is the question. NGEU is a lie in defending the interests of the big multinationals. Current European policies are neither green nor social and their north is not peace," says Lakuntza.

Next Generation EU has targeted a large number of transnational companies from Hego Euskal Herria: Volkswagen Navarra €27,004,575; Sapa Operations €10,332,719; Irizar S.Coopek €7,390,279; Gestamp Abrera €8,934,542; Multiverse Computing €1,897,223; Gestamp Bizkaia €5,400.639 and Mercedes Benz Spain €5,85,567. These are the 100 European companies that have received the most funds from NGEU. However, the public sector, including the municipalities of Bilbao and Vitoria-Gasteiz, has also received a dynamic of subcontracting among the conditions to be exchanged.

Specifically, automotive, and therefore the development of the electric vehicles sector, is the main sustained sector, directly supporting companies and/or subsidizing institutions – the Provincial Council of Bizkaia has received 248,000 euros for the acquisition of 44 electric vehicles through the UN, and the TAV is being a leading player in Hego Euskal Herria. The report makes it clear that hydrogen is a second important area. For example, the Spanish HydrogNetwork association has received great help, and therefore Repsol, as president of the association.

But the autonomous and foreign administrations also participate in this initiative, focusing on the objective of the partnership: The aim is to consolidate the Basque Hydrogen Corridor (BH2C) on the market to the port of Bilbao. In addition to BH2C, they contributed EUR 150 million to 19 commercially viable projects for the production and consumption of renewable hydrogen in industry, heavy transport and other sectors that are difficult to decarbonisation. Another driven sector is the development of renewable energies, which allocate funds to multinationals in the logic of macro-projects in the vast majority.

Care to the detriment of care

An important part of the IUCN is also being monitored, but from a neoliberal perspective of this urgent sector: "The commodification of surveillance tasks is a fundamental challenge, as the rapid obsolescence of citizens and the subcontracting of public services have generated an important niche of business. Indeed, surveillance is a basic necessity that generates a captive market that is very attractive to companies and funds. The UN deepens this commodification and promotes logics of public-private collaboration that have caused the deterioration of the sector; in this case, by influencing digitisation", can be read in the report.

For example, EtxeTIC, a digitalized support service aimed at facilitating home stay, will be fully funded from NGEU funds – 22.4 million for the period 2021-2024. Next Generation EU is based on the objective of replacing the public service. Thanks to this European support, subcontracting is also developing in this sector, with investment funds such as Adriano Care and DomusVi and foreign multinationals.

Other antonym sectors also receive support with a genuine ecological transition: aeronautics – 25% of the aeronautical projects that will receive NGEU funding are located in the CAPV – the industrial cultivation sector – let us say, the National Center for Technology and Food Security located in the Ribera is the main promoter of the business association Spain Food Valley and through the digitalisation of food safety last September. The UN is also intended to develop and guarantee the public-private management of water and the projects supported will be used for industrial cultivation in Navarre and the CAPV to the detriment of citizens.

"Some sectors that take on public funds are not profitable or viable, have increasing precariousness, use authoritarian control, are not sustainable and, in general, act against the basic principles of any eco-social transition process", can be read in the report.

"Need for a theoretical rearmament"

They conclude the report stressing the need for "theoretical rearmament and mobilisations of the political, social and trade union left" at both European and Hego Euskal Herria levels: "It is strategic to create a critical, shared, internationalist agenda that faces the current architecture of the European Union. And to promote feasible alternatives outside institutions and institutions. In order to achieve the emancipation of the peoples of Europe, we must clearly confront the architecture of domination and exploitation of the European Union, together with Euskal Herria and all the peoples of the world who are fighting for a radical transformation of society."