Dancing on a volcano!

Like dancing on a volcano! That’s how it feels after an intense week of negotiations.
The topic of discussion? The next 2028-2034 European budget.
The protagonists? The President of the European Commission against… a European Parliament with a whole host of political colours.

A titanic battle scene between two institutions
On the one hand, there’s the European Commission, which wants the Member States’ support to fund European defence and is prepared to sacrifice cohesion policy by offering heads of government a national envelope that they can allocate according to their priorities (from agricultural policy to regional policy and social policy).
On the other hand, there’s the European Parliament, which sees its role as increasingly unimportant within this architecture and is using the only moment when it has some power to win some concessions.
This is an exaggerated summary; the positions are a lot more nuanced and interests more diverse, but it’s still quite close to the situation that is playing out today.

This week, the European Parliament, the EPP to be precise, asked the Commission to rethink its position and threatened to reject the entire policy. Rejecting a policy before parliamentary scrutiny is rare, yet the only way for Parliament to change the basis of the negotiations. Indeed, in any negotiations, the starting point determines the possible end points. And in this case, the Parliament believes it would be best to reject everything (and therefore have a 2028 budget that would start later, as it would be impossible to accelerate the legislative process given the complexity of the texts.) It’s the somewhat nuclear option, as they call it in Brussels circles. Otherwise, the Commission could back down on merging agricultural, social and regional policies.

The unprecedented thing about this crisis is that the rifts are not between political parties, but institutions. It’s the EPP in the Parliament that is leading the rebellion, the very same group from which the President of the Commission and the main Commissioners in charge of the budget come. The Committee of the Regions voted unanimously for a resolution urging the Commission to rethink its position…

Many stakeholders say they wish to protect cities, villages and access to European funds for all regions to transform the daily lives of citizens. I’m not sure if they’re all completely convinced, but it’s clear that we will have never spoken so much about regional development, the desire for cohesion and concrete improvements to living conditions for all, and that all these arguments will remain as a guiding light for future negotiations.

The tenth Covenant of Mayors Ceremony illustrated just how much the European Union is increasing its local ambitions and investing in the resilience of local authorities. Undermining this link between regions and the European Union is clearly a poor strategy. Let’s hope that the many voices that spoke out this week have been heard. 

To be continued in the next episode

We are organising a webinar for our members to discuss the European budget proposal on 13 November next month. For more info, please contact Allison.