On Thursday 11 January, the co-president of the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament, Philippe Lamberts, strongly criticised the compromises reached last December, both in Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and in the Ecofin Council (see EUROPE 13322/12).
“We have the choice between a very bad solution [that of the Council of the EU] and a bad solution [that of the European Parliament]”, he told a few journalists. In his view, “the EU is sleepwalking into making a major policy blunder” by imposing European fiscal rules that will prevent its member countries from meeting the colossal additional investments needed to make a success of the digital and climate transitions.
Evaluating the volume of public investment needed between now and 2050 at around 2% of EU GDP in just “two consensual areas”, namely the fight against climate change (1.5% of GDP) and defence (0.5% of GDP), Mr Lamberts felt that the only plausible way of financing such needs was through common public debt, via the creation of a “fiscal capacity at European level”.
“We have to do up whatever it takes to finance these investments”, stressed the MEP. This fiscal capacity, which would take over from the Next Generation EU Recovery Plan, could be inspired by the European SURE instrument for supporting national short-time working schemes that the EU put in place in 2020 to deal with the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Countering any criticism that he was being lax on the budget, the co-president of the Greens/EFA group spoke out against a golden rule that would allow certain expenditure or investments to be excluded from the Stability Pact. In October 2022, his group was rather in favour of this, according to a position it had defended before the start of the reform of the Pact (see EUROPE 13044/19). And Mr Lamberts said he was in favour of “intrusive” European rules on national fiscal policies.
Ahead of the plenary session starting on Monday 15 January (see other news), the Green Group has secured a debate next Wednesday and a vote the following day on the European Parliament’s negotiating mandate, while negotiations with the Council of the EU begin on Tuesday 23 January. With a majority comprising the EPP, S&D and Renew Europe groups, this mandate should be approved.
Mr Lamberts hoped that these interinstitutional negotiations would fail, particularly if the European Parliament were called upon to approve an agreement between now and April that over-represents the Council’s position. “Swallowing the Council’s position will be increasingly difficult” in the run-up to the European elections in June, he predicted, arguing that if the S&D group were truly left-wing, there would be no majority for a text based on the two positions on the table.
The MEP rejected the argument of Margarida Marques (S&D, Portuguese), the European Parliament’s co-rapporteur on the reform of the Pact, that the current, even worse, rules will apply if the reform is not completed before the end of the legislative cycle. According to Mr Lamberts, the current rules, which include the 1/20th rule for the annual reduction in public debt, will not apply. This situation will force the Member States and the future European Parliament to relaunch negotiations. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)