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In Monday´s plenary debate, most MEPs criticised the Council’s position on the “rule of law conditionality mechanism” adopted last week, saying it did not create an instrument that could ever be triggered in practice. With continued violations of rule of law and corruption in some EU countries, the EU owed it to its citizens and taxpayers to effectively protect the EU budget. Some even called on the EU to stop financing breaches of fundamental rights in the member states.
The German presidency of the Council and the European Commission were blamed by some MEPs for creating an ideology that would allow individual member states to be attacked.
Michael Roth of the Council presidency highlighted the fact that the Council and the Parliament were finally in agreement on the need for such an instrument, with all of the EU countries on board with the current proposal, and now had the unique opportunity to create its content together. He asked for Parliament’s help in moving the legislators’ positions closer to each other, and expressed his hope that Parliament would support the instrument’s rapid adoption.
Watch the opening statements by Council Presidency and European Commission on EbS+
https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-195701
Re-watch the first round of EP political group speakers on Ebs+
https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-196053
Re-watch the full debate
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/debate-details.html?date=20201005&detailBy=date
Negotiations on the next long-term EU budget and Own Resources continue
Also on Monday, the members of the Parliament’s negotiating team on the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and Own Resources (OR) sat together with the Council of the EU for a sixth round of talks on the next EU long-term budget and new sources of EU revenue. They did not reach a breakthrough, neither on the issue of top-ups for 15 EU flagship programmes, nor on other issues.
After the talks, the negotiating team held a press conference. You can find a summary of it by way of a list of their quotes, with the video embedded, all on this webpage.
See their latest press release (28/09/2020).
Good afternoon. Today’s Eurogroup was in the form of a videoconference again. I obviously look forward to the day we can all meet again in person, but we did have a good discussoin.
Before I go through the main points of the meeting, let me touch upon the ongoing ECB nomination process.
Today, the Eurogroup supported the candidacy of Mr Frank Elderson, currently Executive Board Member of the Dutch national bank, to become a member of the ECB Executive Board, succeeding Mr Yves Mersch. The Council is now expected to formally recommend Mr Elderson’s candidacy to the European Council.
Today was also the first Eurogroup of our new Belgian colleague, Vincent Van Peteghem. Vincent took us through the priorities of the new Belgium government which was sworn in last weekend.
Our first item was the Eurogroup’s Work Programme for the coming nine months. I tabled a comprehensive programme to help ensure the Eurogroup will continue to lead the euro area economy towards an inclusive recovery that benefits all citizens and works on the strengthening of the Economic and Monetary Union. This programme reflects extensive consultation over recent weeks, and I am pleased to say it is now officially endorsed.
If you review this programme, which is now published, you will see that, during my mandate as President of the Eurogroup, we will focus mainly on three priorities – the economy, financial issues and the euro itself. So a word on each.
First, the Eurogroup will focus on economic policies to support the recovery and long-term growth and, ultimately, to support the living standards of citizens at a time of such challenge. We will engage in regular policy dialogue to coordinate our action at national level. This will be based on the ongoing insight of the euro that we can achieve more collectively through the coordination of our efforts that we can achieve on our own.
Our aim will be to support recovery and to support growth and avoid the risk that the crisis of Covid-19 leads to a widening of imbalances and divergences.
Second, we will work intensively to strengthen Banking Union and the Capital Markets Union. We will work to ensure the financial sector can better support economic recovery, and better share and manage the financial risks which of course are always with us.
And third, we will focus on the common currency, our common currency of the euro – which is used every day by citizens but which is also now one of the two predominant world currencies.
Digitalisation is creating major challenges but at the same time opens up many opportunities in the financial sector and for our common currency. We got to work on this programme straight away, with a discussion on our first priority – supporting the economic recovery. Our starting point is that, as you know, Europe has agreed to an unprecedented reform and investment drive, backed by a 750 billion euro recovery and resilience facility.
The recovery is a matter for all EU Member States but, for the euro area, there is still more at stake, as our economies are closely intertwined. The Eurogroup is playing a very important coordinating role here, to identify priorities and to ensure the positive impact on the euro area’s growth and jobs is greater than the sum of individual Member States’ actions.
Today, I sensed a shared view around the table not only on the challenges but also on the actions needed. As we progressively move away from emergency action to recovery, we agreed that our policies should foster economic transformation and unlock new growth potential in the euro area. At the same time, our policy should address the risks of economic divergence and of imbalances.
This has several dimensions.
On budgetary policy, we reconfirmed the view that we should continue to support economies. Ministers shared their intentions to gradually orientate their budgets towards recovery measures, while keeping flexibility to swiftly react to unforeseen developments.
Common financial integration projects, such as banking union and the capital markets union, are even more relevant now than they were before the pandemic.
We also need to prepare for the future, to meet the challenges of the green and digital transitions.
This informed discussion and preparation for the euro area recommendations that we will agree on later this year that will codify these priorities and, ultimately, they will be reflected in our Recovery and Resilience Plans for next year.
Just quickly and in conclusions:
– We took stock of exchange rate developments – this is part of our regular monitoring ahead of international meetings. Our strong and united response to the pandemic has driven market sentiment and it has contributed to the appreciation of the euro.
– We also took stock of the 7th Enhanced Surveillance Report for Greece and we commended the Greek authorities and our colleague Christos Staikouras for the progress made. The pandemic has hit the Greek economy hard, but thanks to the hard and difficult work over recent years, the country can count upon well-managed public finances and the confidence that has been instilled by a track record of delivering economic reforms.
On Tuesday morning, European Council President Charles Michel will present the outcome of the summit, including on other Foreign Affairs topics such as relations with China, the situation in Belarus and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.
EU-UK relations
MEPs will also look ahead to the next regular European Council meeting, to be held 15-16 October, with a focus on the EU’s Climate Law and the state of the negotiations on the future EU-UK partnership including preparing for all scenarios after 1 January 2021.
You can follow the debate live on Parliament’s webstreaming and on EbS+ .
Council and Commission statements
Debate: Tuesday, 6 October
The EU’s civil protection mechanism has helped to look for victims and for those lost in the floods in Italy and southern France, said the president.
Outgoing MEPs
Petra DE SUTTER (Greens/EFA, Belgium) as of 1 October.
Changes to the agenda
Three legislative files, pursuant to Rule 163, will be voted on during the first voting session, starting at 19:15
With no proposal to reject the Council’s positions and no amendments tabled, two proposed acts were deemed adopted:
Wednesday
The title of the Statement by the Vice-President of the Commission/High Representative on “The resumption of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in relation to Nagorno-Karabakh enclave” has been changed to “The resumption of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict”.
The information concerning the distribution of votes is available on the website of the European Parliament under the section “Priority information”.
The changes to the agenda with timing of votes and including requests for urgent procedure on legislative files related to COVID-19 can be found here.
Requests by committees to start negotiations with Council and Commission
Decisions by committees to enter into inter-institutional negotiations (Rule 71) are published on the plenary website.
If no request for a vote in Parliament on the decision to enter into negotiations is made by Tuesday 12.00 midnight, the committees may start negotiations.
Information on the extraordinary remote participation procedure is available here.