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The secret history of the 2018 elections in 84 color pages.
I’ll buy it
For the first time on Thursday night, one of the two-country governments that threatened to veto the EU budget said a compromise was possible without abolishing the rule of law mechanism.
This seemed like a breakthrough, as it has been at a standstill for more than two weeks, threatening that the EU will not have a regular budget starting in January, nor will it be possible to launch the huge stimulus package that comes with the budget. Hungary and Poland are currently blocking spending of 1.8 billion euros in protest that the other member states want to make payments conditional on the rule of law.
Gowin asked for something that was given two weeks ago.
This was the announcement late Thursday by Polish Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs Jaroszlaw Gowin that his country is willing to refrain from vetoing other member states in the Council that the rule of law mechanism will never be used to exercise political pressure and will only protect EU money. applied.
A similar statement has been influenced by the leaders of the EU institutions since the beginning of the conflict. Already on November 16 the opportunity arose, and on September 25, the EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn, who, incidentally, wrote on Twitter Thursday afternoon about a breakthrough on Friday, vetoed a breakthrough. .
Among the offers for Hungarians and Poles is that the two countries receive a document stating that they will not link the mechanism with migration issues. This could mainly reassure the Hungarian government, as Viktor Orbán has been claiming for weeks that the EU would like to force the resettlement of migrants through the mechanism. (One aspect of putting the mechanism together, depending on the current position, could be if a Member State regularly violates EU law and does not correct it. Perhaps the Hungarian Prime Minister could have read that if there was a quota again and he would not meet it, However, the draft mechanism law also stipulates that the mechanism should be used to protect the EU budget, so that the Prime Minister’s concerns are moderately justified at best).
The other offer to Hungarians and Poles is that they will be able to challenge the mechanism itself in some way before the Court of Justice of the European Communities, or the specific penalty if it is ever applied against them.
Gowin has certainly said for such offers that these statements are acceptable to his country after talks with the Commission delegation on Thursday.
But these assurance items have been on the agenda so far, and the two prime ministers have not been at all impressed by these options so far. They demanded that the mechanism be forgotten or remodeled in the distant future, while the European Parliament and the other 25 countries said the mechanism could not be renegotiated or removed from the agenda.
Are you afraid of enhanced cooperation?
The situation has changed in just the past few days alone, with Urusla von der Leyen announcing on Wednesday that if the veto is maintained, 25 member states could adopt the 750 billion rescue package through enhanced cooperation, leaving Hungary and Poland. completely out of it. What this means exactly has already been written earlier in this article.
They also made it clear to about two rumors in Brussels that if they vetoed, they would continue to vote for the mechanism and apply it from 2021, plus they would only receive reduced payments from the start if there was no new budget.
Based on this background, there are two possible explanations for Gowin’s statement of commitment:
- The governments of Hungary and Poland realized that in vain they went to the wall, they could not achieve what they wanted. According to this explanation, the softening of his position is indicated by Gowin’s announcement, which will lead to the lifting of the veto, and this is expected to be officially announced at the EU summit on December 10-11.
- It’s Gowin’s private action, and his high-profile ad really only has national political significance.
Gowin’s sovereignty
It is important to note that Jaroszlaw Gowin is not a member of the PiS, led by the great Polish ruling party, Jaroszlaw Kaczynski, but the chairman of a smaller coalition party, the Consensus, which has only 17 members in the 460-member Polish parliament.
Gowin was still politicizing in Donald Tusk’s party, the now opposing Civic Platform, in the first half of the 1990s, and he was also justice minister in one of the Tusk governments. He only became an ally of the PiS in 2013 after failing to defeat Tusk in his fight for the presidency of the PO.
Although he has held various ministerial positions since 2015, when PiS came to power, he already had big fights with Kaczynski. The last time they met was in the spring of this year, when Gowin disagreed with postponing the presidential elections due to the epidemic and instead suggested extending the president’s term by two years, with the stipulation that no could renew his position. Eventually, the postponement was maintained and Andrzej Duda was elected president for another five years.
Gowin, albeit cautious, has so far opposed the budget veto. In an interview published on Tuesday, he said: “The condition for a country’s sovereignty is the strength of private property and the economy. For dynamic development, Poland needs EU funds, and I mean the reconstruction fund. So I hope that a compromise on the rule of law can be found quickly. The current form of regulation is not only detrimental to Poland and Hungary, but also to the long-term interests of Europe. (…) The version of the mechanism adopted at the July Council was fully justified, and the introduction introduced under pressure from the European Parliament is causing unnecessary confusion and In any case, I stress once again that everything must be done to avoid vetoing the budget and suspending the reconstruction fund “.
That is to say, he did not completely depart from the official direction, since he opposed the agenda version of the mechanism, but he was much less militant than Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who called the mechanism a new form of colonization in the Soviet interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Gowin’s more permissive interview came on the very day that 50 lights in a Polish city led by opposition mayors turned off the decorative lighting of historic buildings in protest of a planned veto, saying “Without Europe, only the darkness”. Among the protesting settlements was Gowin’s house, Krakow.
So for the moment, the conjecture remains whether Gowin spoke only in his own name on Thursday night, or whether he sent a message to Europe with approval from Morawiecki and possibly Orban that a deal could be reached.
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