From external to internal constraints? Social pacts and socio-economic reforms under the Recovery and Resilience Facility in Spain

How do external and internal constraints shape the Europeanization of national socio-economic reform? The dominant view holds that supranational EU constraints —of which the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) is the latest major iteration— empower governments to overcome domestic opposition by tying their hands to EU commitments. We invert this logic: governments with weak parliamentary support may instead deploy social pacts as an internal constraint to gain autonomy vis-à-vis the Commission’s preferences. We test these rival mechanisms through a congruence analysis of Spanish pension and labour market reforms (2018–2024), drawing on newspaper coverage, primary documents, and elite interviews. The internal constraint explanation prevails: Spain’s pre-existing social dialogue agenda shaped its NRRP reform commitments and, in implementing the reforms, the government leveraged social pacts to secure the Commission’s approval of reforms that were formally compliant yet substantially diverged in policy substance. As the RRF-inspired principle of national ownership is set to be extended across other EU economic governance instruments, the Spanish case shows that national ownership can work against the Commission’s own socio-economic agenda.