EU leaders gather today in Brussels for their last summit meeting of the year. On the agenda: the situation in Ukraine and the Juncker Commission's Investment Plan.
The meeting will be the first one led by the newly appointed European Council president, Donald Tusk. Tusk took office on 1 December, replacing Herman Van Rompuy.
In a very short note ahead of the summit, the European Council flagged that leaders would discuss the following topics:
- - The Commission's Annual Growth Survey andJuncker's Investment Plan
- - 'External relations issues', referring to thestalemate situation in Ukraine
- - TheEbolacrisis in West Africa
While the summit was initially planned to last until Friday, EU leaders now aim to end their talks this evening.
Juncker's €315 billion investment plan intends to kick-start growth in Europe by financing a wide array of projects.
The plan is based on €21 billion in seed money from the EU budget and the bloc's European Investment Bank, but could be boosted considerably if member states put hand to pocket.
"Several states have shown potential interest," Juncker said in a debate yesterday at the European Parliament.
"I now wait for concrete proposals and not just 'talk-talk'. I need 'money-money', hard cash now," he said.
But on the eve of the summit, European sources said that while leaders would back the plan, contributions would come only once it was up-and-running with the appropriate laws in place.
"There is a logic to the sequence: First the legislative, then contributions," a senior European official said on condition of anonymity.
To encourage member states, Juncker's plan indicates that contributions would not be counted as part of their national budgets, many of which are in breach of deficit rules which Brussels has tightened up considerably during the debt crisis.
Cash-strapped Italy and Spain have expressed interest in pitching in, but only with a much clearer guarantee that contributions would be looked on favourably by Commission budget overseers.
Despite the doubts, member states are eager to see funds for projects, many of which have been stalled for years.
Last week, member states released a list of 2,000 projects worth €1.3 trillion, in hopes of attracting funding.
The projects include a Frankfurt airport expansion and an underwater fibre-optic link between the Canary Islands and Brazil. In the case of Malta, as we explained last week, the projects on our list include projects such as the construction of a breakwater for Marsamxett Harbour; the construction of a rural airfield in Gozo; the construction of a monorail project across Malta; developing infrastructure for medicines within the public health services and lastly social housing and community services for adult persons with disability.
As in the case of other countries, the list of projects resemble more a wish-list or a list of projects that have been left on the shelves for many years than anything else. As stated earlier, the necessary infrastructure still has to be created and precautions taken so that Europe does not get saddled with further white elephants or butter mountains as happened in the past.
Apart from finding the necessary seed funds, an institution to vet and choose the projects must be set up and then begins the necessary haggling over which projects to do. One criteria that has been mentioned was to give priority to projects that bring neighbouring countries together rather than to prestige national projects for which the Member State itself does not seem to have enough funds to do. In other words, it is not as if the projects can begin in the coming weeks or months.
At the last Eurozone Summit on 24 October, the Commission was invited to develop, in cooperation with Member States, concrete mechanisms for stronger economic policy coordination, convergence and solidarity. The Eurozone Summit invited the President of the Commission, in close cooperation with the President of the Euro Summit, the President of the Eurogroup and the President of the European Central Bank, to prepare next steps on better economic governance in the euro area.
President Juncker has announced that he will present to today's December European Council how he intends to take forward the work on the basis of the Commission's Blueprint for a Deep and Genuine Economic and Monetary Union, published on 28 November 2012. This will be the basis for launching further legislative and non-legislative initiatives to deepen the Economic and Monetary Union.