Debate: Empowering European Youth: post-pandemic employment and social recovery
Date: THURSDAY, 20 JANUARY 2022
Speaker: Dragoş Pîslaru
Country: Spain
Language: EN

It is an honour for me to be able to represent here today the voices of the many young people that I’ve met, talked to and above all listened to. In the past two years in negotiations for the Recovery and Resilience Facility, during the EYE Summit here in Strasbourg, within the Conference on the Future of Europe, and many more other moments, having 2022 designated as the European Year for Youth feels for me, for them, as a rightful culmination of a long road. But it should be just the beginning. I consider this opportunity to ask the question to you, to the Commission and to the Council, their opportunity, and I can assure you, Commissioner, President, that they are going to be listening very carefully to the answers that you will give.  This is because young Europeans are active and vibrant, and no matter what many may fear, they still have hope. They don’t need handouts and they are not helpless. Young Europeans only need the access and the opportunity to take the chances that they deserve, and all that access must be created now and those opportunities facilitated in the present in order to strengthen and deliver our common European dream and not to fall prey to the destructive, radical and nationalistic agenda.  However, there are serious grave concerns about the future we dream of. COVID and the pandemic, but not only, have made those opportunities fewer than ever before, and those windows for access narrower than ever. Young people are twice as likely to be unemployed than other age groups and therefore more likely to be vulnerable to poverty. We ask young people to be brave, to endure, to study better, to study harder without human contact and remotely, to work hard and so often without pay or horribly underpaid. To push through all their fears, all their burnouts, their risk, the deprivation, telling them stories, how in our times everything was harder and they need to buck up.  We clearly failed as a society to recognise just how hard it is right now for young people in Europe. We push them over the edge and ask experience that they cannot get, and then we wonder why they are depressed. We discriminate based on age, gender and an array of other issues, and we often place in front of our youth more barriers than hopes, more asks than tells. And then we are shocked that the second cause of death for a young European was, in 2021, suicide. And still, we do not treat mental health seriously enough at EU Member State level, and the risk that we face is not that of a lockdown generation, but that of a lost generation indeed.  This is why myself, together with my colleagues from the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs in the European Parliament, have prepared these key questions for you, but also drafted the resolution outlining the ways that we think should be the priority policies and topics for youth affairs in 2022 and beyond. And we believe Europe can provide the right solution to empower its youth to have a better future, provided that all of us are working together cohesively, putting money and actions, you know, behind our words for this objective. We need to do, you know, everything from the start together with our young people.  So how will you ensure that they are involved permanently and consistently in all decision-making moments and critical points in the policy design, monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment concerning them and not only? We have the young generation, next generation investment pillar in the RRF and in the national recovery plans right now and many other tools, InvestEU, ESF+, but the question is how we will coordinate them all from a youth policy perspective, avoiding silo policies and ensuring coherence? A one-stop shop, one place where these opportunities can be found and coordinated, you know, and also the substantial usage of the funds for the young European.  More on that. How will we ensure, how will you ensure, that the promise for what is called right now the reinforced youth guarantee will now be finally kept? And all Member States have committed to it. So what are we going to do to deliver concrete results? At the same time, the Union must now together and also at the level of Member States tackle decisively the issue of mental health, admit we have a problem and as any suffering person does, seek help and try to get better. How you will create these opportunities for the prevention, treatment and the recovery of mental health issues for young people? So many of them generated by social ills.  And I can go on and have questions about green and digital jobs, job market support, education, traineeships, microcredits and micro-credentials, mobility and so on. And our employment committee believes that all these things are not solely a public sector responsibility, and we must have permanent partners in the NGOs and the private sector for that.  Lastly, I would like to pledge that we are not simply here to ask things and have a debate. Our young people ask for solutions, and we have put forward such a solution. This House is united and committed to support our youth in concrete ways at EU level.