Press review: EU budget row 

UK press

Writing for the BBC News website, Paul Reynolds says that rather than going for a budget deal, the Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker shold have focussed on "picking up the pieces and learning the lessons" of the French and Dutch Noes.

He argues that the core problem, as noted by Polish PM Marek Belka after the summit, is a lack of leadership. "What is emerging is a number of competing leaderships, none of which inspires much of a following or has much prospect of delivering what it promises," writes Reynolds.

Writing in the Financial Times, Wolfgang Munchau argues that Blair "is right to criticise the CAP. The EU should not focus on agriculture, which accounts for 40 per cent of its budget. The CAP is a hugely wasteful policy that keeps food prices artificially high and distorts the world market for agriculture. It would make a lot more sense for the EU to develop a common foreign or immigration policy and spend resources to improve Europe’s scientific and technological base. 

But three years ago Mr Blair himself accepted a deal to let the CAP continue until 2013. Until a couple of weeks ago he had never even hinted at a link between the British rebate and CAP reform. He sprang this idea on an unsuspecting European Council far too late in the game. Reform of the CAP will eventually happen, but not in this way."

Writing in the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins hits out at the French move to question the UK rebate as "sheer hypocrisy", commenting that "it was France's grabbing of a third of the entire farm budget that led to Britain's special treatment in the first place".

He adds that "France and Germany are under doomed leaders with realist successors in the offing" and that "the Dutch and those in the smaller states across northern and eastern Europe yearn for leadership to help them escape the Franco-German axis". "Blair has a chance offered to no British leader since the post-war settlement. He can lead Europe to a new trading framework and the limited political institutions needed to police it," argues Jenkins.

In an editorial, the Guardian says that it may be "unreasonable" for the French farmers to want more subsidy and protection from the Common Agricultural Policy but that "it is also unreasonable of Mr Blair to repeatedly flourish as if self-evidently outrageous the simple arithmetic of 40% of spending on 4% of the European workforce, when rural life is of such social, psychological and aesthetic importance to a vastly larger proportion of the continent's population".

It argues that Blair's new direction for Europe may well have excited the hostitility of the French and Dutch No voters and that if amplified by the disappointed French and German leaders, the British presidency is going to be "a minefield".

"Mr Blair's gamble in refusing to compromise on the British rebate has succeeded in the sense that it has revealed a wider readiness among governments to consider fundamental reforms of EU financing, and, by extension, of the union's whole economic and social strategy," says the Guardian. 

Writing in the Guardian, Britain's Commission representative Peter Mandelson says that "Tony Blair signalled a radical change by stating that the previously 'non-negotiable' rebate was now up for change. And a strong core of EU member states demanded that farm spending should submit to an early far-reaching review".

He says that "we must now make the case that we can marry globalisation with social justice; that we can open markets in Europe and pursue economic reforms in a way that narrows, not widens, the gap between 'winners' and 'losers'."

"The old European social model was built around protection of jobs. But today many of these arrangements offend social justice as they accentuate an insider/outsider divide that shuts the unemployed out of the labour market," argues the EU's trade commissioner.

French press

In an editorial in Le Figaro: "Tony Blair sang the praises of his free-market, socially minded, British-style third way - the best answer, he said, to Europe's problems. Jacques Chirac, for his part, threw himself into a solitary offensive against enlargement ... The French president has been through one of the most painful European summits of his career."

In an editorial in Libération,  Jean-Michel Helvig writes:  "Après tout, la question posée par Tony Blair sur la finalité des investissements européens mérite examen et débat. Mais son assurance et sa brutalité montrent qu'il s'est vite adapté, lui, à une situation où a été cassé l'élan qui avait permis un lent dépassement des nationalismes par les solidarités communautaires."

The editorial of Le Monde takes the view that Blair had a double victory at the summit: "Sur le papier, on peut incriminer, comme l'ont fait M. Juncker, M. Chirac et Gerhard Schröder, l'intransigeance britannique sur le budget. Le président français était habilité à défendre bec et ongles une PAC sanctuarisée par un accord unanime en 2002. Mais M. Blair a eu beau jeu de dénoncer l'"anomalie" consistant à consacrer 40 % du budget européen à la PAC, c'est-à-dire sept fois plus que pour des dépenses d'avenir sur les sciences, la technologie, la recherche, le développement et l'éducation."

German-speaking press

An editorial in Frankfurter Rundschau says: "The current heads of state and government lack the necessary willpower and courage to throw off their habit of seeing Brussels as a battlefield for national interests ..."

Cornelia Bolesch, from Süddeutsche Zeitung, comments:  "Hinter dem Feilschen um Schecks und Rabatte steht die Grundsatz-Frage, ob die Europäische Union als dynamischer Markt oder als politische Wertegemeinschaft ihren Platz in der Globalisierung behauptet...EU-Gipfel waren selten Orte der Harmonie. Die "europäische Familie" hat sich immer auch nationale Prestigekämpfe geliefert. Doch in der Vergangenheit setzte sich in den Nächten der langen Messer letztlich immer wieder die Methode des Gebens und Nehmens durch und brachte die EU schrittweise nach vorne. Diesmal hat es nicht funktioniert."

An article in Neue Zürcher Zeitung says that the EU is showing signs of paralysis and contemplates whether or not Tony Blair can show the required leadership during the UK's upcoming presidency: "Aber man muss von Blair erwarten dürfen, dass er den eingeschlafenen Lissabon-Prozess zur Steigerung der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit Europas mit aller Kraft zu beleben versucht, wenn seine Position im Budgetgerangel glaubwürdig sein soll."

As to whether he would be successful or not, it says that "möglicherweise wurde am Brüsseler Gipfel zu viel Porzellan zerschlagen, als dass das «neue», am angelsächsischen Kapitalismus orientierte Europa in Bälde die europäische Integration bestimmen könnte".