European Union

Speaking at an economic forum in the Polish city of Krynica, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński has called for a "cultural counter-revolution" to save the EU. Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán expressed similar ideas at the event. Some commentators note with an eye to the Brexit that the Eastern European leaders' critique of the EU is fundamentally correct. For others the two leaders are very much wide of the mark.

Croatians will go to the polls again on Sunday. The coalition between the conservative HDZ and the new Most party collapsed after a no-confidence vote toppled the independent prime minister Tihomir Orešković in June. Commentators see the country as deeply divided and fear that once again there will be no clear election winner.

The citizens of Hungary will vote in a referendum on October 2 on whether to accept mandatory quotas for the distribution of refugees among EU member states. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán rejects the quota system approved by Brussels. The outcome of this referendum could spell the end for the EU, commentators fear.

Three weeks before presidential elections in Austria Czech President Miloš Zeman will meet with Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Commentators voice surprise at this new friendship between the two opponents of immigration.

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us here at the Eurogroup press conference in Bratislava. I would like to take the opportunity to thank our Slovak hosts for the excellent organisation and the splendid venue where we are today. We welcomed to the Eurogroup Petteri Orpo, the newly appointed Finnish Minister of Finance. He was with us for the first time. We also welcomed Alenka Smerkolj who is the Acting Slovenian Minister of Finance.

So this was our first Eurogroup after the summer break, with many challenges ahead. Reading the newspapers which you (journalists) deliver to us, you sometimes feel that there is an atmosphere of doom and gloom over the eurozone. I would like to say that the economic recovery is progressing, growth has returned to almost all of our countries and becomes stronger year on year. Unemployement is going down in most countries so there are some very positive signes throughout the eurozone. Growth is keeping up with the US - that is also an interesting perspective to take - and the support of policies that we have in place: monetary policy, support for investments, structural reforms, improving the quality of public finances, on all of those areas we will continue to push the effectiveness of what we do and see what further steps are needed.

Today we discussed first of all the state of affairs in Greece. We took stock of the progress. There are number of milestones still pending to fully complete the first review and coupled with those are further disbursements. So we took stock of those and heard a little about the issues at stake. There was a general feeling that we must not lose time - the time scale that was drawn up and agreed in May 2016 - so more progress is needed and we strongly encouraged the Greek government as a whole to speed up the implementation of the remaining milestones. That of course could also help in ensuring a timely start and completion of the second review. The work on that will have to start very soon also. Against this background, we were happy to hear from our Greek colleague his commitment to do that work very quickly. We will be following  that closely in the coming weeks.

We also discussed three fiscal issues:

First of all, we looked at the issue of early and late submissions of the draft budgetary plans. We have looked at this a couple of times in recent years and I am glad to announce that all Ministers are committed from now on to submitting draft budgetary plans in the window of 1-15 October. So let's not have anymore early submissions, let alone late submissions. The draft budgets plans need to come in within that timeframe, and that will also allow the Commission to synchronise the horizontal assessment of the draft budgetary plans that then follow.

The issue on what a caretaker governement should do in that period was also discussed -the general line of course being that they can submit a no-policy-change-budget. On these two elements, the guidelines, I believe it is the two-pack, will have to be adjusted and that work will now proceed and come back to us in Ecofin.

Secondly, we took stock of the Commission preparations and the dialogue with the European Parliament in relation to the partial freezing of structural funds commitments following the Spanish and Portuguese EDPs. The Commission informed us on the state of play there and I think we all agree that that the process needs to be completed as soon as possible. As you know the Spanish and Portuguese governments need to, on top of their draft budgetary plans, submit by the latest on 15 October a specific report on the effective action that they need to take. I am sure that Commissioner will say more about that.

Third, we were informed on the progress on the technical work on making the stability and growth pact simpler, more predictable and understandable for all of us - this is about the indicators needed to see whether countries comply with the act. This is the debate we had in Amsterdam during the informal Ecofin and Eurogroup. There is good progress and we should be ready to take some decisions on these budgetary indicators later this year. We will come back to that, probably in November 2016.

Finally, we held another discussion on the quality of public finances in our countries, we have discussed it before - today we focused on spending reviews, which is for ministers of finance a very useful and effective way to get a better insight into improvements on the effectiveness of public spending - to assess priorities, and to ensure that public money is spent wisely and effectively. So we exchanged information and experiences on this topic, and number of ministers informed us how they use the instrument and how it works, and we have designed a number of common principles on the use of this instrument of expenditure reviews. We will come back to that in the first half of 2017 and on a regular base after that.

Those were the key issues today. Let me give a floor to Commissioner Moscovici.

The Eurogroup considers spending reviews to be a useful tool for improving the quality of public finances. They offer a complementary means of supporting fiscal responsibility through reviewing priorities in public expenditure, and can contribute to a more growth-friendly composition of the budget. They have particular relevance for the euro area, where sound fiscal policies are a key matter of common interest and whose Member States have chosen to closely coordinate fiscal policies. In times of high public debt and historically low economic growth rates, there is more need than ever to ensure that taxpayers' money is used efficiently. The Eurogroup therefore calls on euro area Member States to actively use spending reviews. 

The Eurogroup has looked at the experience with spending reviews in  euro area Member States and beyond, and noted a number of principles that need to be followed if spending reviews are to have an optimal impact on the quality of public spending. The Eurogroup therefore endorses the following set of common principles for improving the quality of public finances through the use of spending reviews: 

• Strong and sustained political commitment at a high national level, throughout the project, is essential for successfully carrying out spending reviews and implementing their findings into meaningful reforms.
• The designand implementation of spending reviews should follow best practices that include: (i) a clear strategic mandate specifying the objectives (potentially including quantified targets) the scope (a significant share of general goverment spending across several policies) and a centre of coordination, (ii) the use of pilots to build expertise, (iii) the provision of adequate resources and access to data, (iv) the use of guidelines for consistency in producing diagnosis, baselines, reform options and implementation roadmaps, (v) the use of fact-based analysis linking spending across budget and administrative structures to policy outcomes.
• Monitoring and communication to the public on the progress and outcome of reviews  should be regular and transparent.  Spending reviews themselves should be subject to independent ex-post evaluation to learn lessons for future reviews.
• The ambition and conclusions of a spending review should be consistent with annual and multiannual budget planning. The national fiscal framework should include the principle of running regular spending reviews to inform budget making.

The Eurogroup approves these common principles as a reference point for reviewing national reform efforts to improve the quality of public finances in euro area Member States. The Eurogroup thus invites the Commission to assess developments in this field within its usual processes and surveillance mechanisms, with a view to allowing periodic monitoring by the Eurogroup. Also to this end, the Eurogroup invites its preparatory committees and the Commission to develop a workstream on the exchange of best practices and lessons learnt on spending reviews undertaken in euro area Member States. The Eurogroup expects to revisit this workstream on a regular basis starting in the first half of 2017, drawing on further experiences made in Member States. 

Plenary session and committee meetings in Strasbourg

Source : © European Union, 2016 - EP

Those squealing tyres you can hear are coming from the Berlaymont. Days after launching their proposed “fair use” policy on roaming, the European Commission has pulled the guidelines.

An initial draft was published on 5.9.2016. The Commission services have, on the instruction of President Juncker, withdrawn the draft and are working on a new version.

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