At a time when supporting EU competitiveness is a key issue of the new European Commission, the Finnish MEP of the European People’s Party stresses that since there is no new public capital, we need significant private investment and the attraction of talent within the Union. She notes how the US has taken the lead in the field of digital technologies, leaving Europe behind, which continues to “over- regulate’ the specific area. The Finnish politician emphasizes that the real prosperity of any society comes from investments in the industrial production and not from the subsidy policies of the cohesion fund. Athens Digest’s John Papageorgiou interviewed Aura Salla last week in Brussels. The interview in Greek was published on the financial website insider.gr.

Ms Salla, in the context of both the Draghi Report and the negotiations for the next MFF, a discussion has started on the need for new resources within the EU. As a member of the ECON Committee, you have recently spoken about the need to change how existing resources are utilized. How do you think this can be achieved? And is the ‘RRF model’ which seems to be the EU Commission’s approach a solution to the problem?

We agreed there that we need more money, but we need more private money, not public money. First of all, we don’t have that public money. So, we can we need to make the EU more attractive place to invest in the eyes of the private investors. That should be the goal. So, I fully disagree that we should throw a public debt to our problems. What we need to do is actually stop talking about the real single market and start implementing it. We have been trying to do that, how long, three decades? And still we are not only with the details, we are stuck trying to form the common idea. What we need right now is reducing regulation. We need to make sure that we don’t overregulate our market… the digital sector, the energy sector, the capital market sector. Second thing, we need to attract talent to the EU to make sure that we can flourish and our companies can flourish in the EU. Third thing, we don’t have enough risk capital. I’m not too worried about start-ups and small scale ups. What I’m worried about scale ups of risk capital over €30 million. We don’t have those venture capitalists. There are no venture capital funds in the EU that could invest to these real-growth companies and making exits in this market. What happens is that when our companies grow, they go to the United States. And that worries me a lot. So, the answer is not public money. The answer is private money. But we need to make sure need to make sure that companies, first of all, they want to grow here. Investors want to invest here. And we are enabling this for our firms.

So, how should we change the use of the existing resources? And what does it mean for the cohesion, the convergence of different regional areas?

First of all, I’m challenging cohesion, especially cohesion fund. The problem is that we don’t know what actually happens to this money, how this EU money is benefiting our companies, our regions. Are we actually getting something back? How is this actually contributing to our economy? That worries me. Moreover, building this on subsidies is not sustainable. Let me give you a good example, Juncker’s Fund, EFSI, which we created during his Commission term. There is this idea that you put €1 from the EU budget and then you leverage, let’s say, 17, 18 times from the private sector for attractive companies or ideas or projects. And that’s money well spent. So, the EU gives this guarantee, but then the private sector is the one that believes in these projects and makes actually sustainable growth.  With cohesion funds, the problem is that we are giving subsidies. And I’m always using this example: if you have the industry, if you have a company somewhere, public money will be at the road. But now we’re doing it the other way around. We are first building the road and then we hope that some company will invest at the end of the road. We need to change this mindset and we need to stop using EU budget only for subsidies.
And one thing that worries me now in the new Commission is that Ursula Von Der Leyen said she wants to reduce red tape and also streamline the EU budget so that it would not be so spread for different instruments. But now when I’m looking at the mission letters, I’m worried that actually we will have even more funds. We are talking about housing. We are talking about things that need to be -in the eyes of the Commission- funded again. So, I really hope that someone will address the problem that we don’t have one vice president responsible for, let’s say, making a reform for the MFF, thinking about streamlining.

Let me turn for a while to Greece. Apart from the economic crisis of the previous decade and beyond ancient culture and summer, what else immediately comes to mind when you think of Greece?

People, definitely people. You have put history on the side, otherwise, of course I would have also said, democracy which is the greatest achievement coming from your country. So, I say, people. We can thank Greece for many things, democracy being one of the ultimate ones, but also thinking about the financial crises, what we should have never forgot that our citizens suffered. What we have to learn from the financial crisis is that in Brussels we only tended to focus on a number of speakers while we also had to understand how people needed to live through those difficult years.

So, 15 years later, we are here with two wars in our neighbourhood, the war in Ukraine or the one in the Middle East. Things have changed in terms of geopolitics. Are there areas where the European North can collaborate more effectively with the European South than the past? And towards what direction?

Yes, there is. We are finally talking about the EU defence. And let me be very clear. I know that NATO is the military force in the EU and that’s how it will remain and how it should remain. But what the EU can do is going to be complementary. We need to strengthen our capabilities. We need to strengthen our defence industry. We are quite unanimous here because Ukraine needs to win the war, in the terms of Ukraine and not in the terms of Putin or Trump or anyone else. So, we need to support Ukraine until the day of victory. This is something where we are united. I’m also eager to see how new Commissioner Kubilius will work on EU defence, especially defence industry; doing cross-border procurement, joint procurement, and how we will see this helping Ukraine, but also strengthening overall security of the European Union. I’m also looking forward to reading the former president of Finland Niinistö’s report on overall security. We can already see this is in many mission letters of the Commissioners. And, in Finland, we have this mindset, that it’s not only about defence, it’s about overall security. I’m highlighting this, because it goes to all public policy sectors, to medical sector, to food industry… It crosses paths on different policies. When we talk about cybersecurity or banking, this is something that we need to address in all policy fields. So, some goods did came out from a terrible war that is ongoing. But that’s something that unites us, I would say, in the EU.

And finally, allow me to ask a question about your personal journey. The first time I met you in Brussels, you were an official at the European Commission. After that, you pursued a career in the private sector, in digital technologies at Meta as well, and then you became a politician. Why would someone with your professional profile, want to pursue a political career? Which is the challenge?

I joined my party in 1998 when I was 16 years old. I come from a place in South-East Finland next to the Russian border. I strongly believe that Finland should be part of NATO and part of the European Union. And that’s why I joined politics. I wanted to help create stronger European and Western allies because I believed that was the only way for Finland to succeed as a country. And that’s a true story nowadays. Today, we are even members of NATO. Then, I joined military. I was there a year and a half in Air Force and one year in Navy, because I wanted to understand how the longest border between the EU and Russia actually functions and how is the overall security seen in the eyes of the country facing a really difficult geographical position. After that, the next thing that I wanted to study and understand is the history of the European Union. So, I have my PhD about the EU and financial crisis. You need to understand the history in order to understand the future. Then my career has taking me to different places, but my biggest goal always was to be an MEP. I wanted to work for the EU to make it better functioning for its people. And I ran three times for the European Parliament, in the first one I was in second substitute place, then in first substitute place and finally I made it. But when I lost in 2019, I was still in the Commission, and I was thinking… what will I do next? I was really keen on understanding better how we started to regulate the market on digital affairs, and I was talking against the copyright proposal, the famous Article 11 and 13. I was fighting that fight and I was thinking that Europe is not getting it right. We were overregulating already then. And I wanted to understand what the what the United States is doing correct. The US have this big digital champions. In the EU we were saying that we want these digital champions but at the same time we started this regulatory path. Then I got a call from a head-hunter saying that, okay, I know that you are thinking of going to academia or so on, but hey, think about something else. Go to see how this big thing actually works. And we have a great proposal, you know, come and run this office in the EU, in Brussels. And you will also need to deal with the EU regulation in the databases, so you can do what you want. But you will also understand it from the American companies’ perspective. I said absolutely no. But then I had my last interview with Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK. And I asked him… ‘why do you work for the Company?’ And he answered, ‘I would love to be the Prime Minister of the UK, but that will not happen for me right now. So, this is the next best thing. Because you actually influence things in a in a global scale.’ That was actually true. And I asked myself what do I know about big tech? What do I know actually about the digital world being here in the Commission, in the ivory tower? So, I accepted the challenge and I got the best possible people in my team. I could not be in this position where I am talking about digital regulation without this 3-years’ experience.
But my goal was to make it in the 2024 EU elections and I thought, I will not make it I don’t go back home. There was the national election in Finland then and I decided to run. The evening when I got elected in Helsinki region, I called my boss and I said, I have to quit. And they were like, What? So, I moved my family back to Helsinki. My daughter was three weeks old to my son was one year old.
As an MP, being at the EU Committee helped me understand how the national decision makers think or they don’t think. The ultimate goal was to make it in the European Parliament elections. And thanks to my amazing team, I made it last spring. Finally, I’m there. But with all this experience from the private sector of public sector committees and national state. Now I’m here and I want to work still for the same things that I wanted to work back in 1998 when I joined my party, for a strong European Union that works for its people, for its companies, for its well-being.

MEP Aura Salla and John Papageorgiou, in Brussels