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Angela Merkel seemed a little more tired recently after every EU summit. That didn’t seem surprising: the crown crisis, the ongoing dispute over the EU budget, the antics of US President Donald Trump and 15 years as head of government had apparently consumed the chancellor.
On Friday, however, Merkel looked frankly fresh, although she had traded most of the night. The debate on tightening the EU’s climate target was surprisingly controversial, and it wasn’t until the early hours, after a total of 21 hours of negotiations, that the deal was final. “But it was worth not sleeping one night,” says Merkel. She is also relieved by Thursday’s budget agreement: “A stone has fallen from my heart.”
Joining Merkel are the President of the EU Council, Charles Michel, and the Director of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. You praise Merkel effusively. “I want to pay tribute to the chancellor,” says Michel. “He rolled up his sleeves.” In view of the agreement on the main issues, one could be rightly satisfied, von der Leyen said. Budget, crown package, climate target: “triple!”
High price for the budget deal
The Chancellor’s relief can be seen right now. The German government had been preparing for the presidency of the EU Council in the second half of the year for months. Then the corona virus not only thwarted many of Germany’s plans, including the EU-China summit. It brought the EU a crisis of the century, on top of all the other problems.
Some of them met at the last summit of the year. The most important was the dispute over the budget. For four days in July, heads of state and government fought for the EU’s seven-year budget of 1.074 billion euros and the crown’s recovery package worth 750 billion euros. Hungary and Poland blocked the adoption of the package to prevent the disbursement of EU funds from being linked to compliance with the rule of law.
The other EU countries and the Commission threatened to launch the Corona package without Poland and Hungary and drastically reduce structural funding next year. In the end, Warsaw and Budapest accepted the rule of law mechanism with an additional non-binding declaration, something that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in particular had rejected shortly before.
But the price is high: Poland and Hungary have succeeded in the months of fighting to dilute the mechanism of the rule of law. After all: at the summit, the compromise that Merkel had previously negotiated with the two blockers was approved after just 20 minutes. This paved the way for the € 1.8 trillion budget and crown package, which many participants now hail as historic. On Friday, the ambassadors of the EU countries started the procedure to implement the resolutions.
“That was mainly Merkel’s success,” says an EU diplomat. It wasn’t until the afternoon before the summit that ambassadors from the other states first saw the compromise project. If another country had negotiated the compromise with Orbán and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, “the other 24 governments would have looked at it very, very carefully,” the diplomat said.
But since the deal came from the Germans, there was a leap of faith, which was also due to the permanent representative of Berlin, Michael Clauss. In recent months he has played an exceptionally prominent role for an ambassador in Brussels. Merkel publicly thanked Clauss after the summit, “even if that’s perhaps a little unusual,” as the chancellor put it.
Criticisms of climate compromise
Resolving the budget dispute was also critical because it paved the way for tightening the climate target: By 2030, the EU now wants to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent compared to 1990 levels. Previously, it was targeting a 40 percent decline. Without an agreement on the budget, the most ambitious climate goal would hardly have been possible, if only because it would not have been clear how much EU money individual countries would have available for climate protection measures. (Read an analysis of the climate agreement here.)
The climate debate began at dinner Thursday night. With tomato and zucchini soup, sea bass and citrus salad with honey ice cream, the discussion about saving CO2 and its effect on the economy. The debate lasted all night. France, for example, wanted nuclear power to be classified as a transitional technology, while Poland, which relies heavily on coal-based power, demanded more money for the energy transition. Prime Minister Morawiecki was satisfied in the end: his country would receive more than 50 billion euros for a “just and proper transformation.”
The next crisis is already waiting
Environmental groups criticized the compromise found at the end as inadequate: for the global climate goal, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial times, that was not enough. Merkel was satisfied with 55 percent. “I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t achieved this goal.”
Merkel won’t be able to wait for the deal for long. Because the next crisis is already waiting. The final planned deadline for a trade deal with the UK ends on Sunday. The transition period ends on December 31, during which time the country will continue to have free access to the EU internal market and the customs union after Brexit. If there is no agreement by then, chaos at the borders and enormous damage to the economy on both sides threatens in the new year.
He now has “little expectation” that a deal will be completed on time, Commission chief von der Leyen said on Friday. A little later, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson added: Negotiations had stalled, it was “very, very likely” a no-deal.
