The EU will have greater power to convince governments to hand over cash for grand projects after a largely unnoticed change to spending rules agreed over the weekend.

The move, part of a deal brokered between the European Parliament and countries in the early hours of Saturday morning, “creates an incentive to do things through the EU budget” more than ever, said Nils Redeker, deputy director of the Jacques Delors Institute think tank.

Or, as one Parliament official put it: While it still needs governments to walk through the door to greater spending, “we just created the door.”

The deal ― an overhaul of the EU's rules on national spending ― allows governments to exempt contributions to European Commission spending programs from a country’s official expenditure.

Officials said this could provide countries with a much greater incentive to agree to joint EU borrowing on anything from defense to green projects.

Global stage

The move had been pushed by the Parliament amid geopolitical tensions and pressure to shift to a low-carbon economy.

“Now we have to see what are our challenges are at the global stage and this is something which has to be reflected in the budget,” EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn said.

The Parliament and officials from Belgium, which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the Council, representing the EU’s 27 capitals, spent 16 hours on Friday haggling over the bloc’s fiscal rules overhaul that offers countries more time to cut debt and deficit.

“La guerre de tranchée continue (The trench warfare continues),” wrote a Council official in an email to a colleague on Friday evening, in a sign of how tense the negotiations had become....

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