European leaders on Friday agreed to press ahead with work toward a limited, common eurozone budget and took other steps to strengthen the currency union’s resistance to downturns and crises.
The budget proposal leaves its size undefined and it appeared to fall short of more sweeping ideas pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The EU leaders said finance ministers would work out the details of the budget with the aim of reaching an agreement by June.
Macron has pushed for a large eurozone budget that could support member states that run into economic trouble.
Such a measure would help close a key vulnerability of the euro monetary union, which has one currency and 19 governments. The euro bloc’s weaknesses in adjusting to trouble were exposed during a financial and economic crisis that threatened to break up the currency union from 2010 to 2012.
The leaders’ statement released on Friday after a summit in Brussels said that the eurozone fund would be part of the overall EU budget, suggesting that it is likely to be smaller than Macron’s proposal.
He has called for several percentage points of GDP, but the entire EU budget is only about 1 percent of GDP.
The leaders’ statement also limits the budget’s purpose as helping to make economies more competitive and similar in the way that they function and omits a mention of stabilizing countries in recession — a key lack for the euro.
Proposals for a central budget had been resisted by northern European countries, which are concerned that they would be put on the hook for the troubles of less fiscally disciplined EU governments.
At a post-summit briefing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the budget “a good contribution” and said that “we have agreed on significant parts of what Emmanuel Macron proposed... The French president was certainly very satisfied with that, and so am I.”
The fund was a starting point, French officials said, adding that the amount could grow gradually.
“If you start by saying I want a trillion-euro budget that does everything, when people are already against the whole idea, then you’ll never get anywhere,” a French official said on condition of anonymity.
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