The Prime Ministers of Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic agreed on a declaration within the framework of the Slavkov format, which names the positions of these countries towards the European summit on Thursday (February 12). It indicates the priorities that the European Union (EU) should address. One of them is electricity prices. The Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic, Robert Fico (Smer-SD), informed about this at the press conference after the meeting of the Slavkov format.
“I have urged my colleagues to launch artillery fire towards the European Commission, and that is the issue of electricity prices,” Fico said. He claims that the EU cannot compete with the world if it has electricity prices several times higher than in China or India and has “nonsensically ambitious climate targets”.
“If nothing else and only one informal conclusion could be reached on Thursday, that we will proceed to reduce electricity prices, so I will consider this informal summit a huge success, with the formal conclusions then being taken at the standard summit in March in Brussels.” said the Slovak Prime Minister.
He explained that, for example, in the case of emission allowances, prices could be capped. Currently, according to Fico, their amount is at the level of 90 euros. “On behalf of the Slovak government, we sent an open letter to the president of the European Commission, where we talk about a different approach, whether we could set four- to five-year vacations where the ETS system would not be applied,” he pointed out.
According to him, the purchase of emission allowances has become a business that damages all EU economies because it increases electricity prices. The Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic also pointed to the ETS 2 system, which is supposed to apply to natural persons, but its implementation has been postponed by one year.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš also criticizes the system of emission permits. He claims that for the Czech industry it is minus 159 billion euros. According to Babiš, speculators make money from these allowances. “We don’t want to pay for speculators who make money from emission allowances and companies have to pay them and it destroys the industry. This is unacceptable.” he stated.
According to Babiš, the summit of the European Council cannot end only with speeches. He wants to get other EU states to join the electricity price initiative. “I have spoken to the Italian Prime Minister about this and we will see who joins us and accordingly we will be active and continue to push for it,” said the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic.
Austrian Prime Minister Christian Stocker believes that the question of competitiveness is the basis for the success of the entire European project. “As neighboring countries, we have extremely interconnected economies and economies, which is why we came to the conclusion together that we want to integrate our positions very intensively into the European discourse. Because only when we act together can we achieve more at the European level than if we proceed in isolation,” said Stocker.
According to the Austrian Prime Minister, the EU must be an attractive place for business. He considers climate goals to be important, but they will be of no use to countries if they cannot manufacture and produce. “The European Union is one of the strongest business environments in the world and we must maintain and expand this potential, not undermine it,” he noted.
Fico called the declaration the first step to get the EU out of the crisis. He assumes that the crisis, if no action is taken, could lead the entire Union to disaster. “We are delivering today to the President of the European Commission and to everyone else the joint position that we have adopted. There are also other things related to the automotive industry or the common European market,” stated Fico. He pointed out that this is a comprehensive comprehensive view of the three countries on what should be done in the near future to increase the competitiveness of the EU.
