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At the EU Spring Council meeting of March 14 and 15, European member states discussed European economic governance and the Annual Growth Survey (AGS) for 2013. At the same time, they continued their discussions on the new Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

In view of this meeting, we wrote a letter to the heads of state and government stressing how financial and economic governance cannot exist without a strong social pillar. This is why we called on them to change the focus of the European Semester and to promote the coordination of macro-economic policies with the aim of supporting social policies.

Looking at the 2013 European semester, the key issue discussed was the promotion of growth and jobs and the response to fiscal, macroeconomic and structural challenges. In light of this, unemployment is considered to be the most important social challenge at the moment, and should be addressed through active employment, social and labour market policies. The Council is showing particular support to the agreement reached at the EPSCO Council on February 28 on the Youth Guarantee and calls for it to be rapidly implemented. The Guarantee would help ensure that all young people under the age of 25 receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship or traineeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education.

In its conclusions, the Council also mentioned that "it is crucial to tackle the social consequences of the crisis and fight poverty and social exclusion", but lacks any recommendations or guidelines on how to do so. Not even a reference is made to the recently published Social Investment Package. It was announced that the Council will hold, over the coming months, a series of thematic discussions that should feed into a debate next year on the Europe 2020 Strategy and the review of progress towards its headline targets. We hope that during these discussions the EU's and member states’ underperformance on the poverty, employment and education targets of the Strategy will be tackled in a concrete and effective way. However, at the moment, nothing on this is mentioned as a priority for these meetings.

Looking at the deepening of the EMU, the Council referred back to the four strands identified in its conclusions of December 2012, of which one was "the social dimension of the EMU, including social dialogue". The aim was to have a set of possible measures and a time-bound roadmap on the four strands ready by the June Council meeting.