Brussels, 24/06/2011 (Agence Europe) - The EU27 is calling on the Council and the European Parliament to swiftly reach an agreement on reform of the Stability Pact, although the deadline (at the end of June) will soon have been reached. This reform was negotiated for the first time in co-decision procedure but it is now stumbling on a single point linked to the automatic nature of decisions in the preventive arm of the pact (EUROPE 10404). On Thursday evening, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, declared that “the Council and the Parliament agree on more than 95% of the text. I am therefore urging legislators to finalise discussions so that this important package can be rapidly adopted. I am saying to the European Parliament, the best should not be interpreted as the enemy of what is good”. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, expressed hope on Friday 24 June that the only question still pending out of a total of 2029, would be rapidly resolved.
MEPs are calling for the introduction, in a single stage in the preventive arm of the pact, of the so-called “reverse qualified majority” decision. A recommendation from the Commission stipulating that a country that has not taken the necessary corrective measures for rectifying a deficit and/or excessive debt would be adopted unless a qualified majority of countries oppose it. Member states are refusing to reduce their room for exerting political pressure. The prime minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Junker, indicated that his country had “always” been on the EP's side with regard to this question.
European Rescue Fund. The EU27 also ratified the legal texts amending the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which will replace it in the middle of 2013 (EUROPE 10401 and 10404). The EFSF will have an effective lending capacity of €440 billion and the ESM will have the equivalent of €500 billion. They will be used for intervening on the primary market to repurchase bonds from eurozone countries in difficulty, based on very strict conditions.
The European Council also took into account the European Commission's country-by-country recommendations on the national stability and reform programmes. It urges member states to include these recommendations in their 2012 budgets and demonstrate greater ambition and accuracy in their future programmes. The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, described these discussions as frank and open. He welcomed the fact that member states had not attempted to water down the Commission recommendations (EUROPE 10393). (M.B./transl.fl)