The paper examines the European Green Deal (EGD) as a third building block to the European economic model, alongside the single market and Economic and Monetary Union. It looks at the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and how it interacted with the EGD. Being at such an early stage, one would have imagined that the pandemic crisis could have derailed the EGD framework. The paper enquires why this did not happen. It analyses how the EGD’s narrative was transformed so as to consider it as an exit strategy out of the Covid-19 crisis. It finds that the Covid-19 crisis provided a missing link between the EGD’s long-term objectives and conducive short-term policies. Furthermore, the paper discusses to what extent economic governance changes reinforce the role of the EGD as a pillar of the European Union economic model, contributing also to creating strong (political, institutional and society) dynamics in favour of sustainability and promoting integration.
