Representatives of the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament have embarked on an intensive round of negotiations to salvage a budget for the European Union in 2013.

If a deal is not finalised between the Council and the Parliament within two weeks, the EU will be on course for an emergency budget – one-twelfth of the budget for 2012, adjusted for inflation, extended month-by-month.

Under the ‘provisional twelfths’ regime, which the EU last experienced in the 1980s, no new programmes can be funded, no adjustments between budget lines are possible and special EU funds such as the solidarity fund and the globalisation adjustment fund cannot be mobilised for new needs.

“We are now faced with an unprecedented situation,” said Alain Lamassoure, a centre-right French MEP who chairs the Parliament’s budgets committee.

A senior diplomat involved in the talks warned that a ‘provisional twelfths’ regime would leave core issues unresolved. “How do we set policy priorities and react to changing conditions?” he asked.

A new budget for 2013 was proposed on Monday by the European Commission. It was a resurrected version of the Commission’s earlier proposal, on which the Parliament and the Council had proved unable to agree. Their negotiations had collapsed on 13 November, when the member states refused to accept the Parliament’s demand that the budget for 2012 should be topped up by €9bn as a precondition for the 2013 negotiations.

Last night (28 November), as European Voice went to press, the member states’ ambassadors to the EU were seeking to forge a common position on revising the 2012 budget.

The diplomats were then to go into a new round of negotiations with MEPs.

Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and budget, has proposed as a potential compromise that €1.4bn of the additional €9bn requested for 2012 should be held over into next year.

“If the MEPs insist on the whole €9bn as a precondition for talks on the [2013] budget, then there won’t be any negotiations,” an official involved in the preparations said.

A second round of talks is scheduled for today (29 November).

The timetable for both sides is very tight. The aim is to agree a deal that can be put to the Parliament’s budgets committee on Monday (3 December) and then to a vote of all MEPs at the last plenary meeting of 2012, on 10-13 December. The deal would also require the formal endorsement of a weighted majority of member states.

Both sides signalled their readiness to be flexible, but Reimer Böge, a senior centre-right German MEP who is a veteran of budget negotiations, warned against over-optimism. “It is difficult to predict,” he said ahead of the negotiations. “I cannot judge the mood in the Council, which is given to rapid mood-swings.” He said that the Parliament supported Lewandowski’s compromise proposal for 2012 and stressed that the extra funding he was seeking was to cover legally binding commitments.

If there is no deal on the 2012 top-up request before the end of the year, the entirety of €9bn would be added to the demands for the 2013 budget, complicating negotiations even further.

Discussion of the annual budgets has become intertwined with talks on the 2014-20 multiannual budget.

The Council will be aware that it needs the approval of the Parliament for any agreement on the 2014-20 spending ceilings.

If there is no agreement on the 2014-20 deal during 2013, then the spending ceilings for 2014 onwards would be set at the 2013 levels.

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