Brussels, 14/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - A qualified majority political agreement was reached on Tuesday 14 May at the Council of EU finance ministers on making available two stages of the €11.2 billion extension needed to cover arrears from 2012. The first part will amount to €7.3 billion but the remaining €3.9 billion has still to be confirmed.
There was therefore no minority blocking thanks to the rallying of French and German finance ministers to the proposal of the Irish Presidency on the draft rectifying budget No 2 for 2013. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Denmark voted against the presidency proposal and published a statement.
The text of the presidency, accepted by qualified majority, provides for the immediate settlement of a first amount of €7.3 billion to “to effectively manage the real needs that exist in the budget for 2013 at this stage of the budgetary year and to ensure that the EU budget is equipped to invest in the essential EU policies and programmes that promote economic growth and create jobs”, according to the proposal. The Presidency suggests that this first amount should focus on Heading 1a (competitiveness) and Heading 1b (cohesion). Funding should target policies “that enhance Europe's growth across all regions in the EU through policies such as investment, education and promoting research and innovation, as well as aiming to tackle the problem of unemployment, particularly youth unemployment”.
The Council makes the commitment to return to this issue later in the year, in order to face up to the final supplementary amounts on the basis of Commission proposals. It is not certain that the second stage will amount to €3.9 billion as there will be updated data on budget execution and possibilities of redeployment as well as on possible additional receipts. A Council statement has been published guaranteeing that it will come back to this question during 2013.
Wolfgang Schäuble, the German minister, said (our translation): “We are all facing budgetary constraints and we have little margin of manoeuvre at the level of national budgets. Be this as it may, however, we should find common ground”. He went on to add that if there were no agreement on the multiannual financial framework, this would be a grave danger to the efforts undertaken to allow sustainable growth and to convince the markets.
George Osborne of Britain, who is on the side of austerity in Europe, does not agree with his German colleague. In his view, it is necessary to make savings and that agreement is not unlike bad financial management. He called on the Commission to work on its budget and to cut costs. (LC/transl.jl)