The ten most important news stories of 2021 in the European Union
In both health and economic terms, the pandemic has marked the news in the European Union this year, but in 2021 the climate, Brexit, some changes in power, the energy crisis and the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy also made headlines.
VACCINES
The European Union started vaccination campaigns at the beginning of 2021, but suffered a shortage of doses in the first months of the year that made citizens desperate, who saw the drugs as the only way out of a year of fear and social restrictions until they began to be available to everyone towards the end of the first half of the year.
Paradoxically, at the end of the year, the EU has a surplus of vaccines but a moderate vaccination rate of 67.8% of the total population.
DRAGHI
Former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi became head of Italy's government in February, replacing Giuseppe Conte, with the support of most political parties and promises such as a push for environmentalism and energy transition, tax reform and more vaccinations.
ASTRAZENECA
The European Commission engaged in a bitter confrontation with AstraZeneca in 2021 when it suspected that the drugmaker's delayed vaccine deliveries were due to it selling EU pre-ordered doses to other customers.
Public hostilities ended in a Brussels court, but the Commission failed to get the courts to force AstraZeneca to deliver more doses than the Anglo-Swedish company offered, and the two sides ended the year by burying the hatchet and normalising the relationship after the summer.
SOFAGATE
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was relegated to a side sofa at a reception in Ankara for Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, along with European Council President Charles Michel, occupied the preferential seating in the room, leaving the German on the sidelines.
"I felt alone as a woman and as a European," Von der Leyen later told MEPs, recounting an episode filmed by television cameras and known as "sofagate", which clouded the relationship between the presidents of the Council and the Commission.
BREXIT
After an agonising negotiation over Christmas 2020, Brussels and London reached an agreement on their post-Brexit relationship that began to apply provisionally on 1 January 2021 and definitively on 1 May.
However, the text has returned to the negotiating table because Boris Johnson's British government regrets the commitments made in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, in the face of greatly increased bureaucracy for businesses and some tensions in Ulster, in the umpteenth rectification by London since the 2016 Brexit referendum.
EUROPEAN FUNDS
The European Commission has been analysing and approving recovery plans throughout the year in order to receive the substantial EU funds designed to support economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic.
Spain got the go-ahead from Brussels and received the first €9 billion of the €140 billion allocated in loans and transfers in June and the second €10 billion in December.
CLIMATE CRISIS
In April, the EU made its goal of reducing emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 and achieving climate neutrality by 2050 a legal obligation.
And in July, the European Commission presented a legislative package to decarbonise the economy, known as "Fit for 55" and likely to be the most important of the decade, which is being negotiated with member states and the European Parliament.
ENERGY
With gas prices at record highs and electricity kilowatts skyrocketing, in October the European Commission presented a "toolbox" for tackling the energy crisis, a document that compiles the options already available to countries and does not allow for exceptional measures to be taken.
But the crisis continues to deepen and the debate on energy reform continues and has divided the EU between a bloc of countries calling for exceptional reforms in the short term and far-reaching measures in the energy markets in the medium term, with Spain, France and Italy, and another led by Germany and the Netherlands that calls for prudence and non-interventionism.
CAP
After more than three years of negotiations, the EU reached an agreement in June on the biggest reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in decades, to be implemented from January 2023.
The new CAP, in which climate policy is gaining importance, will be endowed with 390,000 million euros from the European budget for the period 2021-2027, of which some 47,000 will go to farmers and stockbreeders in Spain (where there are some 695,000 beneficiaries) and will be based on new ecological and management schemes.
THE CHANGEOVER IN GERMANY
The political year closed with a historic changeover at the head of the German government, with the departure of the conservative Angela Merkel after 16 years as chancellor of the European Union's leading economy and the arrival of the social democrat Olaf Scholz at the head of a coalition government with ecologists and liberals.