Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa has expressed regret over the failure of the EU to find agreement on the bloc's budget arrangements for 2007-2013. The rich members showed "a fair share of egotism" in the talks, which made a deal impossible, he said after the EU budget talks collapsed late on Friday in Brussels.
"The Luxembourg presidency had tried its best until the very end; for us the last compromise deal on the table was acceptable as exactly that, a compromise," Jansa said after the EU Summit.
"Most of the EU is worse off now that the budget talks failed and the consequences of this failure are not only economic but also political," he stressed.
According to him, it is apparent to the majority of the EU member states that it will be difficult to find a better proposal than the one put forward by Luxembourg in the coming months.
"Five member states opposed the presidency's proposal. Later on, all of them except Great Britain and the Netherlands yielded somewhat in their demands," Jansa said.
He was especially critical of Great Britain's unwillingness to make any concessions on the budget rebate.
"It is therefore unrealistic to expect that an agreement could be reached during the British presidency of the EU (in the second half of this year)...and even later, it is difficult to see Great Britain giving up this demand," he said.
Although Slovenia was one of the countries that supported Luxembourg's compromise deal, it did not join the group of newcomers who, after the talks, expressed readiness to accept an additional cut in development aid for the sake of an agreement, Jansa said.
Slovenia would risk worsening its negotiating position with such a move, he said.
With a deal on the budget unlikely to come anytime soon, Slovenia will now undertake efforts to be reclassified as three statistical regions in order to have the best position when it comes to EU's regional aid, he announced.
The reclassification of Slovenia into three regions would allow the less developed regions of Slovenia to remain entitled to EU funds in the future.
This would offset a new statistical qualification by which Slovenia as one region would exceed 75% of the EU average GDP, meaning that the country could lose a large chunk of development aid since the budget agreement will not be reached before the end of June.
Jansa admitted that Slovenia may now end up securing less funds than it hoped to before the summit. According to him, Slovenia will have to adapt to the new situation on the ground.
However, Jansa is not concerned that Slovenia would not end up receiving any EU development aid in the future. "I can't imagine that the situation would change so drastically as to bring about a strategic change in our position in the next budget perspective...there simply aren't the conditions for that," he said.
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