The Recovery and Resilience Facility and its effects on the Rule of Law conditionality: a (potentially) well-functioning connection

The final steps of the adoption of the “Rule of Law Regulation” (EU, Euratom) 2020/2092 of the Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2020 (see Hegedus’ and Christiansen’s chapter, in this volume) occurred concurrently with the approval of the measures aimed at addressing the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic (encompassed in the Next Generation EU package: NGEU). The most important of these measures was the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), established and regulated by the Regulation (EU) 2020/2094 of the Council of 14 December 2020 and the Regulation (EU) 2021/ 241 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 February 2021. As it often happens, the temporal overlapping of the negotiation of the two sets of legal instruments was relevant for the Member States reaching an agreement. It was the European Council of 10–11 December 2020 which gave the green light to the Regulation 2020/2092 and also to the new Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the Own Resources Decision, which included the authorization to establish the RRF. Moreover, as will be observed, the compromise reached at that moment included a postponement of the full implementation of that Regula-tion, in order to overcome the resistance to its approval of Hungary and Poland (who instrumentally opposed the approval of the new MFF, which required unanimity on the basis of Article 312(2) TFEU). The purpose of this chapter is to highlight how the RRF—viewed as an innovative Euro-national procedure for using financial resources intended to trigger national reforms and investments according to a new “method of government”—interacts with the implementation of the “Rule of Law Regulation”. Indeed, compliance with the—then just approved—Rule of Law Regulation (No. 2020/2092), required during the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans, constitutes a significant and often overlooked element of this new “method of government”. This is an element that, as will be discussed, strengthens the conditionality already embedded in this Regulation and is capable of having a mean-ingful impact in ensuring more effective protection of the Rule of Law in problematic Member States (MS).