Ambassador sees efforts on ‘six-pack’ as ‘incredible’, but warns that MEPs’ power-grab slows down implementation.
Hungary has concluded its presidency of the Council of Ministers by pouring praise on the European Parliament for its co-operation on a vast body of legislative proposals. But it has also fired a warning shot at MEPs, accusing them of endangering good relations with the Council and risking a popular backlash against the European Union.
In an interview with European Voice, Peter Györkös, Hungary’s ambassador to the EU, described as “incredible” the work done to push to the brink of conclusion, the ‘six-pack’ of legislative proposals on economic governance.
The proposals are intended to subject national-level economic policies to greater discipline and to restore confidence in the eurozone. The drafts put forward by the European Commission were voted on in mid-April by the Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee, which demanded extensive changes. Since then, the Parliament, the Council of Ministers and the Commission have been negotiating to agree compromises, against the background of the developing eurozone debt crisis.
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“I guess, never in the history of the EU has such dynamic and effective and impressive co-decision work been done,” Györkös said, pointing to the scale of the challenge. “We had six weeks and 2,029 amendment proposals. Six legislative pieces. First time ever the Parliament had been part of co-legislation in the field of economic governance. And we get there – that there is one open issue.”
As European Voice went to press, the ‘six-pack’ had yet to be agreed, with the Council and the Parliament still at odds about how a finance minister should explain his country’s breach of fiscal rules to the Parliament. According to Györkös, the Council has offered to provide a “public” explanation. The Parliament believes the explanation should be “in writing”.
There is also still no agreement on the use of reversed qualified majority voting (RQMV) in cases where the Commission believes member states have taken no corrective action and ignored warnings on excessive spending. The Parliament wants RQMV because it would make it harder for member states to block a decision. In a speech in Brussels on Tuesday (28 June), Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, reiterated his support for the Parliament’s stance.
But Györkös said that he was not satisfied, “to say the least”, with “the atmosphere in the field of legislation”, pointing to two sources of tension between the Council and the Parliament that were also highlighted by Eniko? Gyo?ri, Hungary’s EU affairs minister, at a press conference on 27 June: correlation tables and delegated acts.
Correlation tables have become a sore point over the past seven months, after the Parliament’s committee of political group leaders decided in December that the full Parliament should not vote on legislation unless it includes a requirement for member states to fill out tables indicating how they are implementing the EU law.
Delegated acts were introduced by the Lisbon treaty, which came into force in December 2009, in an attempt to streamline lawmaking by giving the Commission the power to set the rules of “non-essential”, usually technical, elements of legislation.
Györkös said that a lack of clarity in the Lisbon treaty had given the Parliament the opportunity to try to extend its power, by resisting delegated acts. The cost, he said, was slower implementation. By contrast, he saw the insistence on correlation tables as “a clear breach of the inter-institutional agreement” between the Council and Commission.
On both issues, he said that the Parliament’s stance was taking the process “in a direction that does not make it easy for the Council to be silent”.
Gyo?ri warned that delays caused by disputes over “mysterious” issues risked backfiring on all the EU’s institutions. She pointed specifically to one pressure point during Hungary’s presidency, when the vaccination of cows against bluetongue was delayed by a dispute about correlation tables. If there had been an outbreak of bluetongue disease, people would have thought the entire EU was “hopeless”, she said.