A grim conclusion to EU budget talks

As night shifted into Saturday morning, EU negotiators found solidarity amid tragedy.

It may have been one of the strangest European Union press conferences ever.

Not because an agreement on the EU budget for 2016 had finally been reached. Not because only one reporter stuck around until past midnight waiting to crunch the final numbers after the negotiations between EU countries and the European Parliament wrapped up.

What was so unique and macabre was that the talks among the three main EU institutions — the European Commission, Parliament and Council of Ministers — had taken place while a terrorist attack was being carried out on European soil.

In the end, the marathon negotiations, which started at 10:30 am Friday and lasted until 1 am Saturday, produced an agreement between EU countries and the European Parliament on the budget for next year. The final deal included commitments of €155 billion and actual spending of €144 billion.

That the agreement was found five days before the official November 18 deadline was called “a miracle” by one diplomatic source.

But by the time the deal had been reached, nobody was interested in that particular miracle. The world was reeling from the news out of Paris that more than 12o people had been killed and hundreds more injured in a series of shootings and bombings.

Negotiations were suspended for almost an hour late in the evening and then wrapped quickly when negotiators and aides switched on TVs to follow the latest developments of the attacks.

The events clearly motivated negotiators, who were in “a state of shock” to end the talks quickly with a concrete agreement, according to Commission Vice President Kristalina Georgieva.

Luxembourg’s finance minister, Pierre Gramegna, expressed “mixed feelings” about presenting a “satisfactory deal” at time when EU officials were coming to grips with the violence.

The European Parliament’s budgetary committee chairman, Frenchman Jean Arthuis, said: “We are all deeply affected, because it is Europe which was targeted.”

The budget agreement

The Parliament and the Council of Ministers (representing EU governments) had wrangled over the spending amounts since they were first presented by the European Commission in May.

After several meetings among the various EU institutions there was still a gap between the two sides of €4.2 billion going into Friday night. Closing it took 10 hours of talks, not counting breaks to watch the Paris events unfold.

“This budget is a success, a valuable compromise and gives hopes for the year to come,” Gramegna of Luxembourg said.

Spending to address the migration crisis had been one of the main topics of the day. When EU finance ministers arrived in the morning, the most powerful voice in the room — Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and biggest recipient of refugee arrivals — set the tone: the ballooning costs of Europe’s migration crisis must be the prime focus.

“The current situation with migration is the biggest problem that has faced the EU in a long, long time,” said Jens Spahn, Germany’s parliamentary state secretary for finance. “So if we’re ready to make some cuts in other areas, or at least to do without increases, if we have that spirit in the negotiations, then I think we will succeed in an agreement.”

Gramegna had said last month the budget ceiling could not keep increasing — leading to bickering over the amount of money that each country will have to sacrifice to the cause and which areas will have to be cut during the talks in Brussels and subsequent negotiations in Parliament.

“[Having a] priority means, that in the case of some other areas, you just can’t have everything,” Spahn said.

Concretely, the deal commits more money to front-line countries, including in the Balkans and Turkey, and includes increased resources for external border control, aid to humanitarian organizations and the establishment of hotspots to monitor the arrivals of migrants and refugees. The budget also anticipates additional spending that could be needed next year if the crisis spreads.

Observers said the Luxembourg presidency had skillfully shepherded the budget process, even through disagreements over how much to spend on migration policies.

“They were in a true position of strength, and they did know what they were doing,” said an EU official, noting the deal managed to satisfy EU countries eager to give more to the refugees crisis and others very protective of agricultural and regional funding.

To Gramegna, the deal meant “the EU is working.”

Georgieva, who first presented the budget deal and was part of the talks, was satisfied with the outcome even as she was emotionally moved by the attacks in Paris.

“This is our family,” she said, “sometimes there are some quarrels but at the end I love you all.”

Jacopo Barigazzi and Zeke Turner contributed to this report.