
European leaders are gathering in Brussels amid pressure to rein in the EU budget and punish member states who have spiralling debt crises.
While next year’s EU budget is not formally on the agenda, the UK has been pressing other states to reject a 5.9% rise voted for by MEPs.
At a time of austerity, a rise closer to 2.9% is likely to be agreed.
But a row is brewing over a proposal to temporarily strip repeat over-spenders such as Greece of voting rights.
This Franco-German suggestion for a crisis resolution mechanism would mean rewriting the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, which was itself only adopted after tortuous negotiations.
The proposal was reached independently of other EU leaders, who are formally due to discuss a report by a European Council task force on measures to strengthen economic governance in the EU.
The measures are intended to avoid the domino-like collapse of successive European economies should there be another major debt crisis in one of the weaker members.
“There will be a hot discussion on treaty change,” one unnamed senior EU diplomat told Reuters news agency.
On the eve of the summit, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding dismissed talk of treaty change as “irresponsible”.
“The two of them [Germany and France] must realise that it took us 10 years to close the deal on the Lisbon Treaty,” she told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper.
In her opinion, the treaty already contained enough elements “to safeguard bail-out measures”.
France’s Europe Minister, Pierre Lellouche, fired back with a description of Ms Reding’s language as “unacceptable”.
There is broad agreement among EU leaders on the need for something to be done, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, reports from Brussels.
But a revision of Lisbon would spell major domestic political problems in many EU states with referendums or embarrassing parliamentary votes, our correspondent says.
The Germans clearly believe this may be the only way in which tough automatic sanctions could be imposed on EU countries that break the tax and spending rules.
There may be more heat than light once battle is joined, our correspondent says.
The likely outcome is that the European Council’s President, Herman Van Rompuy, will be sent away to explore how some kind of compromise might be stitched together.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.