A little something in reserve. What concessions does Tony Blair still have up his sleeve, to be taken out on Friday in the European Council, as a final compromise on the financial perspectives 2007-2013? It is in response to this issue that the key to the results resides, given that the other Member states, the Commission and, even more so, the European Parliament felt that Wednesday's compromise was unsatisfactory. It is true that when he presented the new text, Jack Straw said that there was very little room for negotiations, but all observers believe that Tony Blair has not put all his cards on the table, and that he has a little something left in reserve. This is why we are now witness to almost all the Member States over bidding demands, or threats to veto the lot: everybody is trying to jockey for the best position possible to benefit from the last-minute concessions. But we must be sure about one thing: it will not be possible to achieve the degree of ambition the Commission and the European Parliament would have hoped for. Tony Blair's room for manoeuvre should, even so, be enough to allow the result to be considered acceptable.
A shower of little gifts. The improvements in Wednesday's proposal, compared to the proposal of last week, are genuine, but almost universally felt to be insufficient. José Manuel Barroso felt that it was a positive thing that the overall budget had been increased slightly (2.5 billion EUR extra for the whole of the period), and that the two different cohesion policies, one for the Fifteen (based on competitiveness), the other for the new Member States (based on subsidies) had been axed: the rules for the eligibility to funding are, at present, the same for all. We could add to this the measure to facilitate the use of funding earmarked for the new Member States: Community co-funding rises to 85% of the cost of the project (which means that national funding drops to 15%), and this will also go for Greece and Portugal. Furthermore, the shower of little gifts to the different Member States has grown: Poland, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands, the Prague region, Estonia and Latvia, and even the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla get something. At the same time, money for rural development is reduced slightly less brutally (which should console Italy somewhat). The nature of these little gifts is highly variable; they are attempts at captatio benevolentiae, to soften up the recipients.
The central point. Several members of the European Parliament have pointed out the fictitious nature of London's concession concerning the "British rebate". This rebate is not actually reduced, but its automatic increase is: instead of swelling to 7.7 billion EUR a year, it will only rise to around six and a half billion. And it is on this point that we are hoping for extra effort on the part of Tony Blair, and on the permanent and definitive nature of this limitation (you may remember that in his text of last June, Jean-Claude Juncker proposed to set a ceiling on this rebate of 5.5 billion a year). How far will the internal situation and allow Mr Blair to go?
Three scenarios. I have not talked about European ambitions or objectives in the long term, because the future of Europe is not going to be defined on Friday. The immediate objective is simply to allow the enlarged EU to function correctly, and to alter its course to line it up more with the Lisbon strategy (which will, for the most part, continue to depend on the Member States themselves). I do not share the opinion of those who would almost like to see a failure, because this would lead to a real crisis, and state that in any case, the EU would continue to function with its annual budgets. This is not true, because the cost of a failure would be extremely high, especially for the new Member States. The figures which Dalia Grybauskaité , Budget Commissioner , had prepared for a recent meeting of the "Cercle des Européens" chaired by Noëlle Lenoir, defined three possible scenarios as follows: a) agreement of this month, "acceptable" scenario; b) agreement in March, "unfortunate" scenario, because this would drastically reduce the possibilities of launching long-term programmes from the beginning of 2007; c) agreement later than March, "self-destruct scenario", because the long-term programmes could not be launched in 2007, the 2007 budget would be in danger and there would be a serious risk of budgetary war between the institutions.
This is why everything possible must be done in order to reach a compromise, even if it is not the best agreement in the world. European ambitions cannot be relaunched overnight, but the time to discuss them in-depth is coming ever closer; and an agreement on the financial perspectives, running until 2013, would go a long way towards this. (F.R.)