A blocking minority of Member States’ ambassadors to the Committee of Permanent Representatives I (Coreper I) formed on Wednesday 22 December to reject the Interinstitutional Agreement reached last week on the regulation on the coordination of social security systems.
The Slovenian Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Janez Cigler Kralj, remained cautious. Without explicitly mentioning the rejection of Coreper, he stressed on his Twitter account that the Slovenian Presidency of the EU Council had “put a lot of effort into the coordination of social security systems”. The Slovenian Presidency responded politely with a tweet thanking all stakeholders.
9 Member States against, 5 abstentions
According to our information, 9 Member States (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands) voted against the text. The text would have passed if there was only this opposition from 9 Member States.
However, Belgium, Latvia, Slovakia, and especially Germany and Poland abstained, creating a blocking minority. Abstentions in fact count as a negative vote in qualified majority voting in the EU Council.
A qualified majority was difficult to obtain from the outset, given the dissatisfaction expressed by more than a dozen national delegations in the wake of the agreement, in particular because of the short time given by the Presidency to analyse the content of the agreement (see EUROPE 12856/17).
However, a scenario of a further rejection in Coreper of the Interinstitutional Agreement, as was the case for the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council (see EUROPE 12225/15), seemed only yesterday to be avoidable, as the German and Polish positions were still uncertain.
During the debates, the Slovenian Presidency was reportedly criticised again for its handling of the matter, in particular for its lack of transparency and its haste to reach a legally sound agreement.
On the content, several Member States, such as Poland, pointed to the administrative burdens generated by the modalities found on the prior notification (fixed by default, with the possibility however of a late notification at most three days after the beginning of the activity, except for the construction sector - see EUROPE 12855/10).
Others, such as Luxembourg, Greece and Finland, have reportedly expressed concerns about the consequences of exporting unemployment benefits. The transfer of responsibility from the sending to the host Member State for monitoring the unemployed has also been questioned, notably by Malta and Luxembourg.
The Slovenian Presidency, noting the blocking minority, is reported to have stated that this new rejection called for discussion on the text. Some say that the future French Presidency will have little appetite to take up the legislative dossier, which has held six rotating Presidencies in check.
Rumours are circulating, reported by the newspaper Politico in its letter of Tuesday 21 December, but not confirmed by our sources, that the European Commission is considering withdrawing the proposal. To access the Slovenian Presidency’s analysis of the compromise reached: https://bit.ly/3pfoubh (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)