An important chapter in Greece’s economic history is now coming to an end: the European recovery fund created in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, has run its course. The total Greek programme amounts to €35.95 billion, of which €18.22 billion is made up of grants and €17.73 billion of concessional loans; by April 2026, Athens had already drawn €24.6 billion, or 68.5 percent of the total allocation. The programme was also designed to do more than inject money into the Greek economy: it tied funding to reforms, digitalisation, energy investment, transport, labour-market development, and private-sector investment. The question now is therefore not whether Greece received enough money, but whether it can sustain the investment momentum created by that funding on its own.
The Greek economy is in a very different position today from where it stood during the debt crisis of the 2010s. Growth remains resilient: the OECD expects GDP to expand by 1.9 percent in 2026 and 2 percent in 2027, while employment and rising disposable incomes are supporting consumption. The Recovery Fund, however, is beginning to disappear from the equation precisely when investment needs to take over as the main driver of growth. According to the European Commission, Greece’s RRF programme alone could raise the level of GDP by almost 4.5 percent in 2026 compared with a scenario in which these policies had not been implemented. This illustrates the scale of the problem: this is not simply the end of a one-off support programme, but the disappearance of a source of financing whose macroeconomic impact has already become embedded in Greece’s growth model.
The next phase for Greece is therefore likely to be less about austerity and more about mobilising capital. The real test will be whether investments initiated by the state can continue to attract private capital on a lasting basis. If they can, the Recovery Fund will have fulfilled its historical function: it did not simply finance the Greek economy, but bridged the period during which the country regained the capacity to finance larger-scale investment. If, however, investment declines as EU funding disappears, it will indicate that Greek growth remains overly dependent on external transfers. The OECD already expects investment growth to moderate in 2027 as the Recovery Fund winds down.
There is another, less visible problem as well: who will pay the operating costs? Building a new digital system, energy infrastructure, transport project, or public service is easier to finance through a one-off European grant than to maintain for decades. This is one of the classic dilemmas of EU funding models: the investment can easily become a political success, while the cost of maintaining it appears later in the national budget. Greece therefore now has to demonstrate not simply that it can spend European money, but that the assets created with European funding can generate economic value on their own.
And ultimately, this is a much bigger question than Greece. In the 2010s, the country was a symbol of Europe’s financial problems; in the 2020s, Greece has become something of a test market for whether the European model of joint investment actually works. The coming years will show whether tens of billions of euros in funding have triggered a genuine shift in productivity and competitiveness, or merely accelerated convergence during a period when the EU financed a significant share of it. After the Recovery Fund, Greece no longer needs to spend money. It needs to generate growth.