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Poland says eurozone budget could spell ‘end of EU’
WARSAW, June 22, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Poland on Thursday warned that a
eurozone budget proposed by France and Germany to bolster the 19-member
currency bloc could spell the end of the European Union should it drain
resources from the shared budget of all members.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday won German Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s backing for eurozone reforms, including a vaunted budget for the
bloc.
Macron said it will be a “real budget with annual revenues and spending”
with its own governance structure, adding that Paris and Berlin hoped to have
it in place by 2021.
Merkel said that funding mechanisms were also up for discussion with other
eurozone members, suggesting that it could involve regular transfers made by
individual countries, a tax on financial transactions or funds from the EU.
The size and other details still remain sketchy and its creation could
still face resistance from other members.
Krzysztof Szczerski, chief of staff to Poland’s President Andrzej Duda,
insisted on Thursday that “if the eurozone states decide to spend extra money
for this (eurozone) budget, then that’s their internal matter, but if it were
to be created at the expense of their contributions to the general (EU)
budget, then that would be the end of the EU.”
“It would de facto mean that the eurozone is going its own way and that
it wants to operate outside the general framework of the EU,” Szczerski told
the Polish PAP news agency.
– ‘Serious imbalance’ –
He also warned about deep imbalances that could come about should the
proposed eurozone budget be adopted in tandem with the European Commission’s
draft post-Brexit budget for 2021-2027.
It proposes spending more on southern eurozone members like Greece and
Italy hit by the economic and migrant crises and less on increasingly wealthy
eastern states like Poland and Hungary.
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“If the EU tries to change the priorities of this (draft) budget to move
more funds to the southern members that are in the eurozone, and additionally
wants to help them with money under a separate eurozone budget, it is
creating a very serious budgetary and economic policy imbalance,” Szczerski
told the PAP.
European sources have said that Poland and Hungary would receive more than
20 percent less in cohesion funds in the next budget, compared to the current
2014-2020 spending plan.
The Polish government has already denounced the proposed reduction as
“unacceptable”, a stance echoed by other eastern EU members including the
Czech Republic and Latvia.
EU big guns like Germany and France back a “multi-speed Europe” in which
some members could deepen integration faster than others, but eastern nations
like Poland are strongly opposed.
They favour decentralisation with greater powers to individual member
states.
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