The Lisbon Treaty and the budget

Helga Trüpel, MEP

In the early afternoon I accompanied the Vice-President of the EESC, Seppo Kallio, who happens also to be the President of the EESC’s Budget Group, to the European Parliament to meet the EP’s rapporteur for the institutions’ budgets for 2011. This was a courtesy call designed to elicit early indications from Parliament’s side about the likely parameters within which the institutions will probably have to work in drafting their 2011 budgetary bids. The landscape is changing. The new budgetary procedure established by the Lisbon Treaty provides for only one reading, where once there were two, and as matters currently stand the smaller institutions will be excluded from the conciliation procedure foreseen thereafter. On the policy side, none of the institutions could anticipate the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in their draft 2010 budgets last year and so now they are considering whether to introduce supplementary budget requests. This is a particularly important issue for the EP, which has seen its powers grow considerably, but it is also important for the other bodies. Then there is the ongoing crisis. Even though there may be perfectly legitimate and strong reasons for requests for big increases in 2011, the institutions know already that the member states in the Council would find it very difficult to approve large increases in a crisis year. So; in a sense it’s the usual balancing act between calculated real requirements and political possibilities, but with even greater rigour than in previous years.