In recent weeks, the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers had taken to the counter. The latest dates back to Thursday 24 when the Strasbourg Assembly rejected the 2014 budget, returning it to the sender. With the reasoning that the Council, in fact, had reduced the balances requested by the parliamentary body and also those that had been originally proposed by the Brussels Commission. But within twenty-four hours or so the picture seems to have calmed down. And everything suggests that, while the Council-Parliament conciliation committee is about to start negotiations to find an agreement on the 13 budget in a very short time (by 2014 November), also the multiannual financial framework 2014-2020 and the additions to the this year's budget can be launched before the end of December.
The first positive signal came from Coreper, the Committee made up of the ambassadors of the 28 member states to the European Union (which prepares the texts of the Council's measures), which on Tuesday the 29th approved the final version of the agreement concluded the negotiations with the European Parliament on the political issues, still pending, which are not regulated in the legislative "package" relating to social cohesion policy, one of the most important chapters of the draft seven-year budget 2014-2020.
Among the issues on which this agreement was reached, one assumes particular importance since it seems to indicate the beginning of a trend reversal in support of the economically weaker areas of Europe, i.e. those which are (or should be) the natural recipients of the cohesion policies. In fact, these regions are the ones that will benefit most from the inclusion, among the criteria used to identify the territories most in need of support from the European structural funds, of three significant parameters in particular for the Italian regions lagging behind: the unemployment rate , the level of poverty and the reduction of gross domestic product.
“This agreement – underlined the current president of Coreper for the second semester of this year, the Lithuanian Raimundas Karoblis – is important because it will make it possible to start using, from the first day of 2014, those 300 billion euros that the project budget 2014-2020 has allocated to the new generation cohesion policy”. And it is also important because the release of cohesion funds will most likely allow the overcoming of the openly declared refusal of the European Parliament to put the seven-year financial framework on the agenda of the next plenary session, scheduled in Strasbourg from 18 to 21 November.
But there is another signal that indirectly contributes to fueling optimism about the prospects for European budgets. The signal comes from the EU Council of Ministers which on Wednesday the 30th approved the amendment which allocates to the 2013 budget the 3,9 billion euros needed to settle the outstanding invoices relating to advance payments from the Member States from the structural funds.
A sum which, according to a formal commitment signed at the end of 2012 by the presidents of the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament, should have supplemented the 2013 budget before the end of this year. "A debt that the Council has refused to honor". the president of the liberal democratic group in Strasbourg, Guy Verhofstadt, said in recent days. Statement which was echoed by the hard-nosed ones of the president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz (of the group of socialists and democrats) and of the head of the Italian delegation in the PPE group as well as rapporteur for the budget in question Giovanni La Via. Both firm on the position that "without the prior approval of the additions to the 2013 budget, Parliament will not give its consent to the seven-year budget 2014-2020".
“Evidently the firmness of Parliament has had an effect”, says Giovanni La Via now. Who foresees that the European Parliament will have no difficulty in approving the amendment relating to the "top-up" of 3,9 billion at the November plenary session. But he expresses perplexity regarding another amendment approved by the Council. “It is – he explains – an estimated expenditure of 509 million: of these, 109 are intended for Frontex and other expenses for the reception of immigrants and those seeking asylum. The other 400 million are directed to solidarity interventions for the damage caused by the floods in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic as well as by forest fires in Romania”.
Here, however, another dispute could arise between Parliament and the Council. “The solidarity fund is drawn on the occasion of particularly serious natural disasters. But it cannot be accepted - adds La Via - that the cost of resources rightly directed to countries affected by natural disasters is covered as a result of the subtraction of funds from the territories and populations to which they had been assigned. And I believe that Parliament will not be willing to approve this".
But in the end, the regular visitors to the Palaces of Brussels and Strasbourg foresee, an agreement will be found. And there is a good chance that the legislative process of amendments to the 2013 budget, the 2014-2020 financial framework and – why not? – also of the 2014 budget can be concluded positively before the end of the year.
