First day of European summit ends without agreement

The first day of the summit of European Union (EU) heads of state and government to agree on the EU budget and the post-pandemic recovery fund ended at around 23:30 (21:30 GMT) on Friday without agreement, and will resume this Saturday.

"The meeting of the European Council is over. The meeting will continue tomorrow at 11am" (9.00 GMT), wrote Barend Leyts, the spokesman for the President of the European Council, on Twitter.

Negotiations continued on Friday without any sign of rapprochement between the distant positions of the leaders, particularly between the bloc of so-called northern countries, led by the Netherlands, and several southern countries, including Spain.

The first day of the summit, which was essentially dedicated to the 27 leaders presenting their position to the rest, lasted about 13 hours.

The meeting began with a first debate on the thorniest issues on the table, such as the size of the budget between 2021 and 2027 or the volume of the recovery fund, as well as the conditions for accessing aid from this instrument.

They then discussed the criteria for distributing aid from the fund, the new own resources for the European budget and the system for making access to Community funds conditional on compliance with the rule of law.

At around 6pm, the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, called a three-hour break in which several meetings were organised in smaller formats with a view to paving the way for a consensus.

However, after meeting again at 27 for a dinner of approximately two hours, it was decided to close the first day without an agreement and resume tomorrow, Saturday.

Among the main points of disagreement continue to be the governance of the recovery fund, with the Netherlands standing alone in its demand that recovery plans submitted by countries to receive money must be approved unanimously by all 27 member states.

There is also still a lack of consensus on the size of the European budget over seven years, which the compromise proposal put at 1,074 billion euros and the northern countries (Holland, Austria, Sweden and Denmark) want to reduce, or on the discounts that several Nordic countries have in their contribution to the community coffers, which France wants to eliminate.