The ECR Group has tabled its own alternative resolution calling for a realistic and growth-oriented strategy to reduce poverty across Europe.

The text urges the European Commission to strengthen targeted measures that help the most vulnerable overcome poverty, while avoiding rigid binding objectives that risk producing counterproductive effects and deepening social challenges.

Speaking in the debate before the vote, ECR Shadow Rapporteur Georgiana Teodorescu MEP, who drafted the Group’s alternative resolution, warned:

“The leftist approach, we witnessed too many times already, overburden Member States with new bureaucracy and increased public spending. Poverty should be defined as a significant barrier to economic opportunity and the enjoyment of rights, with emphasis on empowering individuals and communities to overcome it.

“We must promote policies to foster job creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship and focus on a competitive economy so that employment becomes the vector of a wealthy society.

“Creating new structures and control mechanisms, imposing objectives and overlapping subsidiarity have proven to be the best recipe for failure.”

The ECR resolution focuses on strengthening labour-market flexibility, reducing regulatory barriers and ensuring equal access to employment opportunities as central tools in the fight against poverty. It calls on Member States and the Commission to prioritise investment in growth-enhancing initiatives, including improving digital literacy, monitoring and reducing school dropout rates through targeted action, and supporting policies that stimulate job creation and economic opportunity in emerging sectors.

Concluding, Ms Teodorescu said:

“The future EU strategy should concentrate on combating poverty in rural areas. We need to offer housing alternatives in our devitalised villages to people at risk of poverty from urban areas. We should seriously tackle transport and energy poverty leading to social isolation and overspending, hence lowering opportunities for economic mobility.”