German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite attend a European Union leaders summit in Brussels yesterday.
BRUSSELS: The European Union clinched a political deal on its hotly-contested trillion-euro budget yesterday as EU leaders went into a summit pledging to deliver growth and jobs for Europe’s ‘lost generation’ of young people.
The budget deal opens the prospect of the EU being able to quickly put billions of euros into measures to help Europe’s 5.6 million unemployed under 25-year-olds. With crisis-induced austerity and high unemployment testing voters’ trust in the European project, the fight against youth joblessness is topping the two-day summit.
“I hope we have a good summit, a summit for youth employment, a summit to control finances and a summit for growth and jobs,” said French President Francois Hollande. “Frankly that is what Europeans expect.”
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces elections in September in a country largely weary of funding struggling southern European states, warned that discipline remained key. “We’ll also talk about how we can develop economic and monetary union still further, alongside budget consolidation,” she said.
“The main thing here is about improving our competitiveness,” she added. “It’s not about creating more and more pots of money.” The bloc’s 27 heads of state and government also met trade union and business leaders in the first such talks.
Earlier, after months of bitter argument, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso announced a budget compromise at emergency breakfast talks. This could accelerate the pumping of funds into schemes to get youngsters out of unemployment and into jobs or training schemes.
“Today we have agreed on this budget that will make investment in Europe possible,” Barroso said of the compromise on a ¤960bn ($1.25 trillion) budget that still needs to be approved by the EU’s 754 lawmakers. “This is the growth fund for Europe,” Barroso added.
Austerity-minded hardliners Britain, Germany and the Netherlands early this year shot down Commission plans to increase spending by five percent over the next seven years. Reuters
