Bialystok, 04/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - European peripheral maritime regions speak with one voice in their defence of a decent budget for Cohesion Policy, despite the line taken by their central state in the talks on the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF, five-year budget plan). They voice two main concerns to the EU decision-makers - cuts in the Structural Funds on the one hand and the phasing out of transition regions on the other - and urge their national governments to work to remove both areas of concern hand-in-hand with a weighty ally - the European Commission, which does not want to see any cuts in its budget proposals.
Meeting in Bialystok, Poland, since Wednesday, the heads of the peripheral maritime regions of Europe (CPMR) kept talking about the same thing - the budget - as talks on the MFF are hotting up and might lead to a special European summit at the end of November. The general trend is for budgets to be slashed and the Cohesion Policy is in the firing line of net contributing countries in their calls for 'better spending.' This was admitted by director general of DG Budget at the European Commission, Hervé Jouanjean, who said that the same idea that keeps coming up at the Council of Ministers is that there must be at least a €100 billion reduction in the Commission's proposals; in other words some 10% of the proposed amount. This is deplored by the head of the CPMR, Jean-Yves Le Drian of France, who is French defence minister and president and regional advisor of the region of Brittany, who says that member states, including France, are calling for the European budget to be slashed.
Rejection of budget cuts across the board. In Bialystok, all participants fear that cohesion will take the brunt of the cuts and the regions warn the member states that this would amount to shooting themselves in the foot. Le Drian said that one couldn't praise cohesion in the morning and then cut funding for it in the afternoon. He explained that cohesion was not welfare, but a policy of solidarity that goes hand-in-hand with competitiveness and, as the president of the Committee of the Regions, Ramón Valcarcel Siso, who is also president of the Spanish region of Murcia, pointed out the Cohesion Policy is above all, investment, and cutting it would be dangerous in the current situation. He said that half of investment in the member states is financed by the structural funds, without which, the member states would not be able to afford even the current levels of investment, and this would lead to a freezing of economic development. EU Regional Policy Commissioner Johannes Hahn said he did not understand why countries were calling for these cuts. He called for rapid agreement on the MFF and hoped that the upcoming talks would reveal that the planned cuts were not as extreme as had been announced.
Lobbying central government. Le Drian urged his partners to get their goverments to take action. Net contributing regions do not necessarily share the views of their central government, as is shown by a region in the north of the Netherlands. On behalf of the Council of the EU, Cypriot European affairs minister Andreas Mavroyannis said governments had to be made to understand the dangers and the contradictions of the planned cuts. Jouanjean said he had not lost hope because everything was on the table and the decisions had not yet been taken, but politicians at regional and local level attending the conference all had to take action and put pressure on their national governments to make sure they got the right message. Hahn said he had himself been voicing that message for a long time. He said that the action by the region had already borne fruit and some regions did not need to take action because the central government already agreed with them. He said he had just had a meeting with the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, who has been calling for a substantial increase in funding for the EU Cohesion Policy.
Mobilisation for transition regions. The peripheral and maritime regions urge caution over the budget for 'transition' regions, a new category introduced in recent cohesion legislation. So few countries defend the category that they could well get caught out in the MFF talks. Le Drian said regions in transition or more developed regions must not be deprived of EU funding to deal with the crisis. Jouanjean said that a debate had been opened up and he said the regions should take it to the heads of state. An optimist, he said there was the potential to make a break-through because decisions are only taken late in the day after much haggling. Hahn, however, took a firm line, saying that the gap between the least and most developed regions is in reality wider than suggested by the statistics, and an intermediate category is needed to reflect this. Recognising that the Swedish, British, French and Dutch 'transition' regions are proactively defending their interests, he said that he would be meeting with their representatives the following week. (MD/transl.fl)