Agreement has been reached on the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) after 57 hours of negotiation in 8 rounds of trialogue.
The result has received a mixed response. Clearly, the European Parliament had hoped to protect the Horizon 2020 and Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) budgets. While this was not nearly as successful as they hoped, the position of the political groups in the European Parliament is that still made important negotiations.
The most favourable result for the European Parliament is that the annual budgetary procedure is now central to the financing of the EFSI rather than an irrevocable budgetary commitment which the Commission and Council had originally insisted upon.
