“We have to manage to show that we are united”, warned Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, before joining the European Heads of State and Government on Thursday 15 December. Ten months after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, when recession threatens and inflation soars, the Twenty-Seven must, more than ever, display a united front against Moscow. But, even if before the summit, they had tried to regulate all the subjects which annoy, the business did not announce itself so simple.
Because he was opposed to the introduction of a minimum tax of 15% on multinationals, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki threatened to overthrow the legislative package that had been adopted with this text, whose aid of 18 billion euros to Ukraine in 2023 and the validation of the Hungarian recovery plan. For Warsaw, very close to kyiv and Budapest, “It was rather counter-intuitive”, commented a diplomat. The intervention of Volodymyr Zelensky by videoconference, at the start of the council, clearly got the better of Poland’s reluctance. Mateusz Morawiecki lifted his veto. Relief around the table.
Second thorny issue: the ninth package of sanctions against Russia, which provides for new restrictive measures for nearly 200 entities and personalities, including ministers and Duma deputies, the ban on drone exports to Russia, the placement of three more blacklisted banks and the end of new investments in the mining sector in Russia. But Poland and Lithuania refused the derogations provided for therein for the agri-food sector and fertilisers. The Europeans do not want to be accused of being responsible for future famines in Africa or elsewhere because they would prevent Russia and Belarus from exporting products to them which they so badly need. Eventually, Warsaw and Vilnius lifted their objections.
Urgency to act
Finally, the discussions on the competitiveness of European industry – endangered by the differential in energy prices between Europe and the rest of the world on the one hand and the massive plan (369 billion dollars) of subsidies to green technologies Made in USA of Joe Biden – could, too, be derailed. Because if the Twenty-Seven share the observation that there is urgency to act, on the way to go about it, on the other hand, they diverge very widely.
On the issue of the price of gas, which has soared since the start of the war in Ukraine, they avoided getting to the heart of the matter, as they know that it can lead them until the end of the night . For the time being, therefore, there is still no agreement on the level of the ceiling – between 160 and 200 euros per megawatt hour – and the matter will have to be dealt with at the Council of Energy Ministers on 19 December.
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