EU budget: MEPs highlight ‘political deficits’

The Austrian EU presidency must make good on promises both to reform European spending and find more cash, Reimer Böge has told EUpolitix.com.

The European parliament’s lead negotiator on Europe’s financing from 2007 to 2013 is set for a new round of “trialogue” talks on Tuesday.

He suggests that is a “50/50 chance” of a successful outcome to three-way negotiations between MEPs, the Austrian EU presidency and European commission.

“There is a chance now to come to an agreement during the fourth trialogue. Of course, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” he said.

“We made some progress on reform, on parliament’s rights. Of course, the question of the review clause and the question of more flexibility are still in debate.”

“There is a 50/50 chance to come to agreement and we should not be too optimistic, there will still be some difficult hours of negotiations. But the chance is there.”

Böge is concerned that some governments may unpick EU presidency pledges on key issues made on March 21.

If some national governments use Coreper – the committee of permanent representatives – to roll back wording from then, warns Böge, all bets are off.

“It is very important to say that the Austrian presidency has to go back with certain agreements to Coreper to get the green light."

"If the Coreper reopens certain questions again, we will also go back to some of our original demands and positions,” he insists.

“If everybody is ready to compromise there is a chance on Tuesday to get a result.”

Behind parliament’s negotiating position is a postponed resolution, agreed by the parliament’s budget committee, tearing up financial planning procedures by rejecting an inter-institutional agreement between parliament, national governments represented by Council of the EU and commission.

Böge and his committee colleagues shelved threats to move back to annual Brussels spending rounds only because progress had been made.

“We had a constructive third trialogue and the reason to postpone the resolution was to honour these constructive talks and not raise emotions in parliament or the council. It was clear that we would not come to a final result but at the same time we made more progress than we expected the week before,” he says.

Failure, or attempts by some national governments to limit transparency or parliament’s rights in future budget talks, could see the resolution dusted off for Thursday’s parliament plenary votes.

Key – but not absolutely critical – to agreement will be cash. The parliament has demanded an extra €12bn as the price of a deal. The EU presidency has dangled a meagre €1.5bn to €2bn.

Böge explains the sums behind the parliament figure, which is larger than the budget that sank talks under the Luxembourg EU presidency last June.

“We made a political analysis of the outcome from last December on certain programmes based on the calculations of the commission.”

“We saw that certain programmes, Erasmus, Leonardo, Trans-European Networks, the Competitiveness and Innovation Programmes, culture, youth and consumer protection are underfinanced,” he said.

“This political analysis leads us to present the figure of a €12bn increase which is really needed to protect these European added value programmes."

"Of course, the council said this is unacceptable, this is far too much and will never be accepted. But we wanted to show at this state of play where the political deficits lie. The council has to take responsibility.”

Click here to read full interview

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