In the eighties Portugal was a poor country but we had the expectation that joining the European Union would point us to the path of development and progress. Currently, in 2025 we no longer know! We no longer know, because we are unaware of the direction the European Union is taking, if there is one.
Imagine, dear readers, that the current government of Luís Montenegro rightly decided to lower VAT on all products associated with civil construction from 23% to 6%. It is a measure that has complete logic and is imbued with a social context given that it will apply, after ratification by the Assembly of the Republic, to all homes that do not exceed rent values of 2300 euros and sales values of 684 thousand euros.
Well, so far so good. However, we read with astonishment in one of the daily newspapers that this measure could be blocked by a gray Community Directive from the distant year 2006 (112/EC) which determines that member states will only be able to apply reduced VAT rates in the case of housing supplied and built under social policies.
Well, these people from Brussels must be eating too much “mulles” (mussels), which is causing brain blockages.
Given the housing crisis that exists in several European Union countries, this should be the first to speed up measures to encourage housing construction in its Member States. But no. In the backwaters of the most retrograde and smelly bureaucracy in the European catacombs lives, in lethargy, a 2006 directive (imagine) that conditions the reduction of VAT to 6% and allows it only for social housing. But haven’t these people discovered that from 2006 to 2025 the concept of social housing has changed and the shortage of housing is now a reality that needs to be addressed?
Dear readers, The European Union is currently a mixed bag where no one understands each other and there is a lack of quality leadership. The system of unanimity in which it is enough for a country not to agree for all decisions to freeze, constitutes an almost systematic block to the speed that today’s world needs to progress.
In an inexplicable paralysis, the European Union continues to admit into its fold countries such as Hungary, by Vítor Orban, and Slovakia, by Robert Fico, whose ideas are at the antipodes of democratic principles and which, on a daily basis, undermine the foundations of the European project.
With a threat of war on the doorstep, the European Union is unable to organize itself into a common defense policy that gives meaning to a project that it so desperately needs in the face of threats from Russia. Only France is particularly sensitive to the Russian threat, which it takes very seriously.
Meanwhile, faced with so much paralysis, nationalist governments are undermining and taking positions towards the destruction of the European project.
With slow growth, the two main European drivers show worrying signs of fragility in their development rates. Germany predicts GDP growth for 2026 of between 1.2% and 1.5%, while the second driver, France, its GDP growth in 2026 will not exceed 0.9%.
Too bad to be true!
Meanwhile, the demographic problem in the European Union is getting worse without a consistent immigration policy replacing the lack of labor that is being felt across all European countries. This is when the United States is registering a remarkable growth in its young population.
Caught between two technological giants, China and the United States, the European Union is unable to keep up with the speed and progress in digitalization and in the field of Artificial Intelligence that these two powers are registering. With an outstretched hand, the European Union is begging for chips to feed its industry, which is being outdated, particularly the automobile industry that ruled the world years ago.
Quickly call Mário Draghi, this is a statesman, someone with firm ideas and a project for the European Union. And fire those who, there, do little more than say banalities to the television cameras like António Costa, Ursula Von der Leyen and Kayal Kallas. Unless they want to continue letting the European project of Robert Schuman, Jean Monet and Jacques Delores sink, who, at this point, must be transfixed by the current results of one of the most beautiful and challenging projects the democratic world has known.
Journalist