EU leaders race to secure two trillion euro budget deal
A Memorandum on the Removal of Uncertainty from the Multiannual Financial Framework, Submitted to the European Council by a Friend of Predictability
The Council’s difficulty is not money. Nearly two trillion euros, spread across the seven years from 2028 to 2034, comes to something like four thousand euros for every soul in the Union. That is a large sum, but it is a sum, and sums can be divided. The difficulty is time. The leaders who assemble this Thursday have been told, by every sober adviser in every capital, that a deal must be struck before Christmas, because after Christmas come elections, France’s above all. Elections may return governments less fond of the Union, and those governments may decline to sign what their predecessors drafted. The adviser does not say this with alarm. He says it as a man reads a tide table.
I accept his premise entirely, and propose only to finish it.
If the purpose of the Christmas deadline is to settle the Union’s finances before the voters of its largest founding republic can express a view on them, then the deadline is no scheduling convenience. It is the instrument’s chief design feature, and should be treated with the respect owed to any load-bearing wall. A seven-year budget negotiated in a window chosen to close before an election is a budget that has already concluded, quite reasonably, that the electorate is a risk factor. Prudent institutions do not leave risk factors unhedged.
Some will object, and the objection deserves its full weight. They will say the deadline exists for the sake of the beneficiaries: the dairy cooperative in the Auvergne, the regional hospital in Moravia, the researcher in Porto whose grant ends in a calendar year and not in a political mood. These people need certainty, and the voter’s caprice threatens it. I could not agree more. But the objection, followed honestly, does not defend the election. It indicts it. If certainty is the good, and the ballot the chief source of uncertainty, then each election falling inside a budgetary cycle is a defect in the cycle, and defects are engineered out.
I therefore propose an Electoral Stabilisation Mechanism. Under it, national elections in member states would be held only in the eighteen months following the adoption of each Multiannual Financial Framework, when nothing of consequence remains to be decided, and would be suspended for the remainder of the period, during which everything is. Citizens would keep their full right to vote. They would simply exercise it at the moment when it could do the least damage to the arrangements made on their behalf. This is not a curtailment of democracy. It is democracy with an amortisation schedule.
The Mechanism would bring several further economies. Eurosceptic parties, whose appeal rests largely on the claim that Brussels decides things without asking anyone, would find that claim instantly formalised, and therefore no longer a grievance but a procedure; one cannot well campaign against a published timetable. The Commission would be spared drafting contingency plans for a France that has changed its mind. And the annual summit, with its night sessions and its leaders photographed at dawn in yesterday’s shirts, could be replaced by a single signing every seven years, timed to the calendar instead of to dread.
A further refinement presents itself. Seven years was chosen, one assumes, because it is long enough to plan and short enough to revise. But revision is precisely the hazard the deadline exists to avoid. If a framework is safest when agreed before the people can weigh in, it is safest of all when its term exceeds the political memory of the people. A framework of fourteen years would outlast two French presidencies. One of twenty-eight would outlast most of the farmers it was written to reassure, who would be spared the anxiety of the next negotiation by the simple expedient of not living to see it.
I make no claim that the Mechanism is elegant. I claim only that it is consistent, which is more than can be said for a Union that calls itself a community of democracies and then sets its watch by the date on which democracy might interrupt it. The leaders are already doing the thing; I ask only that they put it in the treaty, where it can be audited.
On Thursday night, somewhere in the corridors of the Europa building, a junior official will be standing at a whiteboard with a marker, counting the working days between now and the twenty-fifth of December, and then, a little further down, writing the date of the French vote. He will draw a line between them. He will not need to label it.