BRUSSELS: Brussels is attempting to switch into austerity mode in 2011, amid anger over EU funds that wind up in dog-fitness clubs and Elton John gigs.
However, efforts to slash costs are likely to hit a brick wall -- what one senior official describes as a "Rubik's Cube" of competing interests over the lion's share of European Union monies.
France defends farm funding, some 40 percent of all spending, tooth and nail; Poland likewise resists all moves on cohesion funding, or grants for poorer regions; while Britain jealously guards the hard-won rebate Margaret Thatcher secured in the 1980s.
If only small margins remain after the three great pillars of EU spending, cost-cutting is nevertheless the talk of the town in Brussels.
It was Britain's new Prime Minister David Cameron who blew a wind of austerity into the home of the European Union last year, when he launched a campaign to crimp the 2011 budget.
He initially wanted it frozen, but secured a 2.9 percent-increase ceiling instead of a planned six percent rise.
"The challenge for the European Union in the coming years will not be to spend more, but to spend better," Cameron said in a letter co-signed with France and Germany, and backed by Finland and the Netherlands.
Talks for the 2012 and 2013 budgets are weeks away, with pressure already building up from member states to keep the numbers steady at this year's 126.5 billion euros or 246 euros per person in the bloc of half a billion people.
Frantic cost cutting proposals are flying in from both the EU's executive arm, the commission, and the 736-member parliament.
Leading Euro MPs this week launched a drive to end the "ridiculous" dual sittings of parliament in Brussels and the French city of Strasbourg, a post-World War Two "anachronism" estimated to cost 180 million euros ($245 million) a year while leaving a 19,000 tonne carbon footprint.
"In today's climate the economic and environmental cost of two seats can no longer be justified," said British MEP Edward McMillan-Scott, vice-president of the parliament.
Britain lost no time backing the drive to end the monthly shuttle of thousands of members, assistants, interpreters and boxes of files. France said it was out of the question and would require a change to the EU treaty a prospect few relish.
But MEPs say real cuts in the budget, currently tantamount to 1.04 percent of EU gross national income, can only come from the same member states critical of EU spending.
"It's the member states who are undermining the credibility of the EU because they're the ones who don't monitor their own spending," Germany's Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a budget rapporteur, said this week.
Mismanagement and misuse are rife, even among austerity preachers such as Britain.
Among projects cited by Chatzimarkis was a 400,000-euro lifestyle centre for dogs in Hungary, that was never built, farm funds for Britain that wound up in a golf and a hunting club, and a controversial Elton John concert in Italy financed under a cultural project.
In 2010, the MEP said, 10 programmes in Britain were blocked by the commission due to deficient management, 21 in Spain and seven in Germany.
Parliament, he said, wanted the commission to spell out new guidelines for funding, including performance goals and demands that finance ministers from the member states be accountable for the use of funds.
"There has to be a new philosophy," he said.
The commission meanwhile has ordered the EU's main institutions, from its parliament to the court of justice, to cut spending.
In a document obtained by AFP, budget commissioner Janusz Lewandowski told the EU's sprawling institutional set-up that officials "cannot ignore the broader economic and budgetary context."
The European Commission itself would keep the increase in administrative costs below one percent in 2012 compared to this year.One area it wants to do better on is heavy transitional salary payments to departing eurocrats who turn lobbyists in breach of ethics."The battle for the 2012 budget is going to be bloody and leave victims on the way," a commission official said.
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