EU leaders clinch deal on five billion stimulus plan[fr][de] 

"It's all agreed," Polish EU Affairs minister Mikolaj Dowgielewicz told journalists before the end of the summit. As his prime minister, Donald Tusk, had said on Wednesday (18 March), Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries pushed for the Nabucco gas pipeline project during the two-day EU summit (EurActiv 18/03/09). 

Germany has finally agreed to include the Nabucco gas pipeline in the list of projects, earmarking as much as 200 million euro for a risk-sharing facility, intended to help secure loans from banks at better conditions than those offered on the market. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had initially refused to back public funding for the pipeline, which aims to reduce the EU's dependency on Russian gas (EurActiv 17/03/09). 

Merkel apparently gave in to pressure, requesting in exchange that sums be spent quickly to help Europe's economic recovery in the short term. Indeed, the adopted document envisages spending two billion euro on energy projects in 2009, and another 1.975bn in 2010. A total of 3.975 is to be spent on energy projects. 

This may however mean that the funding for Nabucco and other projects, favoured by Eastern European countries, could be lost. "East European countries are usually slow in absorbing EU funding," a diplomat told EurActiv. 

The initial Commission's draft proposal had earmarked a smaller sum (3.5bn) for energy projects (EurActiv 29/01/09), but as member states added more works to the list, a new figure emerged. As the overall sum is capped at five billion, almost half a billion euro were taken from a project to develop broadband in rural areas and from projects on tackling agricultural challenges. 

A comparison with previous versions of the EU executive's proposal shows that two East European countries badly hit by the recent gas crisis have received modest increases to their sums – Slovakia will share 30m euro with its neighbour (instead of 25m) for a gas interconnector with Hungary, and Bulgaria will get 45m instead of 40m for another interconnector with Greece. Infrastructure to permit reverse gas flows between a number of Central and Eastern European countries will be allocated 80 million instead of 75. 

In what looks like compensation, Germany gets 50m euro more for a single project: an offshore wind project in the North Sea. 

To make up for the increased sums for gas and offshore wind projects, a number of Western countries agreed that five carbon storage projects be downscaled to 180 million euros instead of 200m, again in comparision to the previous draft. 

But doubts still remain regarding the financing secured for the plan. The final decision states that "more precise estimates […] will be only known once the 2010 budgetary procedure is at its closure" (autumn 2009). 

The ball will fall now in the European Parliament's court to approve the plan and its financing scheme. One group of MEPs has already signalled that they will not let the plan go ahead unchecked, and may well seek to amend it. 

Claude Turmes, vice-president of the Green group in the Parliament, told EurActiv in an interview that he was putting in place a blocking minority to get the plan amended (EurActiv 13/03/09).