European Union leaders were locked in intense negotiations on Saturday evening in an attempt to save a summit on the terms of a €750bn pandemic recovery fund from an acrimonious end as the debate over the bloc’s financial future became “heated”, The Guardian reports.
A second day of talks in Brussels saw Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, publicly accuse the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Sweden of being “misers” while the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, claimed the Dutch were trying to rewrite the EU’s rules.
The leaders are split over both the size of a recovery fund and the seven-year budget due to start next year. There is also stark division over the nature of the conditions attached to the emergency funding and the balance between grants and loans on offer to countries hit by the crisis, The Guardian informs.
