The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility as a “Transition Stabiliser”: Analysing government turnover in Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia

This paper analyses the capacity of the European Union (EU)’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) to function as a ‘transition stabiliser’ in Member States experiencing government turnover. While existing scholarship has highlighted the RRF’s innovative governance model – combining national ownership with performance-based monitoring – it has also underscored persistent tensions between discipline and discretion, technocracy and democracy, as well as flexibility and formalism. Building on this literature, the paper introduces a temporal dimension by examining how changes in government affect, and are affected by, the implementation of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs). Because the major transformations underpinning the RRF – notably climate neutrality, digitalisation and welfare reform – extend well beyond electoral cycles, political change represents a critical stress test of this new governance technology. We conceptualise ‘transition stabilisation’ as the capacity of the RRF to anchor long-term reform trajectories, reduce incentives for abrupt policy reversals and mitigate the effects of short-termism. The instrument’s contractual commitments, combined with conditional disbursements and a ‘no reversal’ rule, provide a degree of continuity even when political preferences shift. At the same time, stabilisation is neither automatic nor normatively unproblematic: domestic ownership, democratic legitimacy and the Commission’s balancing act between rigour and adaptability all shape outcomes. Recent evolutions in the Commission’s approach – including broader interpretations of ‘objective circumstances’ and ‘better alternatives’ when assessing plan adaptations – highlight how political change has driven a more flexible reading of conditionality. Empirically, the paper draws on the process-tracing of political developments in Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia, combining analysis of parliamentary debates, media coverage and secondary literature with a set of elite interviews involving officials responsible for RRF implementation and interaction with the European Commission. These three cases differ substantially in the size and ambition of their NRRPs, their administrative capacity and their levels of political polarisation, yet all experienced turnovers from pro-EU governments that designed the plans to more Eurosceptic or populist successors. Preliminary findings suggest that the RRF has exercised a stabilising effect across all three cases, albeit in uneven and contested ways. In Slovakia, the instrument anchored reforms through episodes of volatility and even caretaker governance. In the Netherlands, it functioned as a disciplining device despite low political salience and legitimacy. In Italy, it constrained the scope of reversal following the change from Draghi to Meloni, while leaving underlying administrative vulnerabilities intact. Overall, the RRF can stabilise reform trajectories during government turnover, but this stabilisation remains conditional, politically mediated and far from depoliticised.