Andrej PLENKOVIĆ, Prime Minister of Croatia, addresses a message to EU citizens, to thank them and give them hope at the end of a very difficult year 2020. [ Ссылка ] EU leaders address messages to EU citizens, to thank them and give them hope at the end of a very difficult year 2020.
Lockdown, social distancing, masks, teleworking, video conferences: 2020 has been a year like no other. [ Ссылка ] It is a year that will be remembered for the COVID-19 (coronavirus) global pandemic that has shaken our societies and our economies to the core and unleashed a crisis of an unprecedented scale.
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A new president of the European Council, Charles Michel, and a newly inaugurated European Commission took office on 1 December 2019. They set out their ambitions and got to work on what was a pressing priority: reaching agreement on the long-term EU budget for 2021-2027, the basis for all EU policies and programmes to come, in particular the climate and digital transitions.

Only days into the Croatian presidency of the Council, which started on 1 January, crisis management became the top shared priority. The future of the EU budget took on a whole new dimension as the scale of the recovery effort needed became clearer in the spring. 'Recovery' would be the leitmotiv of all legislative and policy work under the German presidency in the second part of the year, with the motto “Together for Europe’s recovery”.

This visual story reviews some of the work of the Council and the European Council over the past year, and how it helped steer the EU from crisis to recovery.

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COVID-19 pandemic - A crisis response

From the early days of the pandemic, the EU took action to tackle the crisis. It put in place measures to protect citizens’ health while mobilising the EU budget, enabling maximum flexibility in the application of budget and state aid rules and establishing an emergency support package for workers, businesses and member states.

In December 2019, the Chinese municipality of Wuhan experienced an outbreak of COVID-19, a new type of coronavirus. The disease quickly spread to other regions and by January 2020, isolated cases had appeared in some EU member states.

Integrated crisis response

To respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, on 28 January 2020, the Croatian presidency of the Council decided to activate the EU's integrated political crisis response mechanism (IPCR) in information sharing mode. IPCR is the EU framework for the high-level political coordination of responses to cross-sectoral crises, led by the Council presidency.

At the end of February 2020, Italy reported a significant increase in COVID-19 cases concentrated in the northern regions of the country. Most other EU member states started reporting cases of people infected. By March 2020, all EU member states had reported COVID-19 cases, and the number of cases continued to increase.

A coordinated EU response

Health, diplomacy, civil protection, the single market, the economy: as the situation evolved and the number of sectors affected by the crisis increased, the presidency escalated the activation of the IPCR mechanism to full mode on 2 March 2020. The full activation mode allows for crisis roundtables with the participation of national and EU-level authorities. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

In particular, the EU’s response to the pandemic in 2020 aimed to:
- limit the spread of the virus with temporary and regularly reviewed restrictions to non-essential travel to the EU
- ensure provision of medical equipment, entrusting its civil protection mechanism to mobilise supplies
- support jobs, businesses and the economy, with a €540 billion support package, including temporary support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency (SURE)
- help EU citizens stranded abroad, with a coordinated repatriation effort
- promote research for treatments and vaccines, increasing support and funding for research and development
- fight disinformation with timely, fact-based and transparent communication

A global crisis response

From the outset of the pandemic, the EU directly contributed to the WHO's global response and stepped up its support to countries in need. At the same time, the EU led global efforts to make a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 available to all, including in less wealthy nations.

Recovery - An opportunity for transformation

With crisis comes opportunity. In July 2020, EU leaders agreed a €1.8 trillion package, combining the long-term EU budget for 2021-2027, and an extraordinary €750 billion recovery effort, the Next Generation EU. The agreement paves the way for the EU to boost its climate and digital transitions.
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