EU leaders pledge billions for economic revival
On Friday leaders from around the continent met for the second day of the European Union’s Spring Summit, chaired by Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek. The Czech EU presidency went into the summit with an ambitious agenda, including the financial crisis, energy security and an Eastern Partnership project that aims to forge closer ties with a number of former Soviet republics.
“Prime Minister Topolánek came to Brussels, saying that this summit was about getting down to action and getting some of the money pledged by EU governments to battle the financial crisis spent. And at Friday’s press conference he showed up with some very concrete facts and figures. The first was 50 billion euros that the EU is now putting into an emergency scheme to help countries outside of the eurozone like Hungary or Romania to revive their flagging economies. Another very concrete outcome of the summit is that going into the G20 summit in London in April the EU is ready to pledge 75 billion euros to the IMF to help countries outside of the EU whose economies are also having a hard time at the moment because of the financial downturn. So the summit produced some very concrete results, although none of the massive financial injections or bailout packages that US President Obama may have wanted the EU to decide upon in the last couple of days.”
Were there any surprises or hitches in the course of the talks?
“There was some controversy over a much smaller amount of money – 5 billion euros of still unspent EU funds that are supposed to go towards tackling this financial crisis. The Germans and the French were rather unhappy with the Czech suggestion that they should go into a pipeline called Nabucco to bring gas from central Asia to Europe, but not lead through Russia or Ukraine. Germany was possibly slightly unhappy about this because it itself is building a new pipeline and there could be potential competition. But somewhat surprisingly on Thursday night Germany backed down and said it would support Nabucco and it seems that in return a portion of this five billion euros will go to Germany to help improve high speed internet there.”
“So far, very well. It was just praised by the head of the EC Jose Manuel Barosso who called it a summit of delivery. I’d say that going into the summit a lot of EU governments knew that something did have to come out of this. Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek himself was saying that the worst thing for consumer confidence would be if EU governments had met here and failed to decide upon things. So it seems that a lot of concrete decisions have been made and that unanimity has been found across the board on how to deal with the financial crisis. And on a national level, I think Czechs can be very happy because they have this pipeline approved and the Eastern Partnership scheme – you could call it the Czech EU presidency’s baby – has been approved as well. That will be launched in May in Prague.”
