Political impasse threatens SRM progress

Plans for a single resolution mechanism (SRM) are mired in a dispute between the European Parliament and the Council for the European Union (EU), with politicians today expressing anger at the slow pace of negotiations.

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) met with representatives from the Council and the European Commission for discussions this week, but were unimpressed with the level of progress and took turns to take shots at the negotiating process in today's plenary session in Strasbourg.

The Council's decision to call for an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) on the design of the SRM and, crucially, the single resolution fund (SRF) remains the parliament's main bone of contention.

One MEP, Gabriele Zimmer, captured the general mood at today's session, saying: "There has been no movement on the Council side. Not on the IGA. Not on the decision-making process. We [insist] that we stick to the community method".

Sharon Bowles, the Economics and Monetary Affairs Committee chair, says there are "limits" to how long the co-legislators could simply explain their positions to one another: "The Council must move and be more European. We need to be clear that minute and incremental steps are not enough".

The EU finance ministers are scheduled to pick up their discussion on the SRM on February 17, but parliament president Martin Schulz said today that he would send a letter urging them to meet sooner.

Meanwhile MEPs voted to reaffirm Parliament's "original negotiating mandate" and to grant more time to the economics committee to hash out an agreement with the Council. Bowles says there are merits in each side's positions and that any deal will have to incorporate the best of both.

Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner, acknowledges the IGA is a "sensitive issue" and agrees that a common approach, where decisions are made at a European level, is "the best way forward".

Nonetheless he defends the Council's decision to involve national authorities, insisting that recourse to an IGA "is not at variance" with the European treaties, providing their discussions are exclusively about the mutualisation of funds.

MEP Sven Giegold says today's vote is "a line in the sand" on the need to ensure the SRM is "set up as an EU entity and not an unwieldy intergovernmental construct".

"With legislative negotiations between the Parliament and EU governments deadlocked on the legal basis and structure of the proposed mechanism, this vote makes clear that Parliament is serious," Giegold says. "Hopefully, EU finance ministers, who have hitherto been picking apart the original proposals from the Commission, will now see sense."