— A new edition of the cycle of virtual meetings “FGE | NextGeneratiOn Galicia” brings together European and Galician officials before the launch of a new financial period for the implementation of the Structural Funds.

— Adding the allocation of the new period to the 22 billion already received, this community policy will have invested in Galicia nearly 28 billion euros.

— 85% of the new resources will go to strengthen Galicia’s competitiveness and sustainability.

Brussels, 26th October, 2022. The Galicia Europa Foundation (FGE) held the eighth virtual meeting of the year within its cycle “FGE | NextGeneratiOn Galicia”. The meeting brought together some twenty officials from the autonomous public sector with representatives of the European Commission to address the challenges and prospects of the 2021-2027 Structural Funds programming period that is now getting underway.

The director general of External Relations and with the EU, Jesús Gamallo, welcomed all the participants, pointing out that Galicia is going to receive around 3.27 billion euros from this European policy that represents a third of the entire community budget. “This money will be added to the more than 22,000 million euros that this policy has invested in Galicia since Spain joined the European Communities in 1986,” recalled the director general.

For her part, the director of the Galicia Europa Foundation office in Brussels, Ana Ramos, warned how the seven-year programming exercise was delayed in this new period. First because of the complicated negotiation of the Multiannual Financial Framework, then because of the regulations of the funds and finally because of the implementation in Spain of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism. “The resources from this new fund double the amount that Spain usually receives from the cohesion policy. In addition, they must be implemented in a shorter period of time and with very different rules, which is a great challenge for all the administrations in Spain”.

Ana Ramos said: “The resources from this new fund double the amount that Spain usually receives from cohesion policy. In addition, they must be implemented in a shorter period of time and with very different rules, which is a great challenge for all the administrations in Spain”.

All this made that the European Commission is today about to give the go-ahead to the Partnership Contract with Spain, the basic document that will lead to the approval of more than 40 operational programs, regional and plurirexionais, through which the EU will invest about 36,700 million euros the next seven years in Spain with the aim of reducing territorial disparities. This was explained by representatives of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, who highlighted the contribution of cohesion policy to the convergence of all the autonomous communities with the European average, giving some figures: 190 billion euros invested (a figure higher than Portugal’s GDP), 73,000 SMEs directly supported, creation of 95,600 jobs, access to broadband for 2.4 million people, etc.