Four days and a fourth night of negotiations: European leaders, meeting in Brussels on the EU's recovery plan, are on the way to breaking the record for the Nice summit in 2000, which lasted 85 hours.
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Already at that time, when the EU had only 15 members, the battle in the seaside resort of the Côte d'Azur pitted the small against the large and the States of the North against those of the South for the arrival of the countries of Eastern Europe. The summit opened shortly after 3:00 p.m. local time on Thursday, December 7. It was preceded by a conference between the 15 members of the EU and the then candidate countries - mainly from Eastern Europe -. Taking this conference into account, the summit started nearly five hours earlier, shortly before 10 a.m. local time, and lasted nearly 91 hours. On the menu for the negotiations at 15: reform of the EU institutions with a view to its enlargement."It was a great bargaining to reach the agreement found on the night of Sunday to Monday December 11 at 4:26 am - according to an AFP alert at the time - in general exhaustion", said several participants. It was a question of agreeing on the introduction of a decision by the majority of the member states and no longer unanimity in certain specific political areas in order to avoid blockages and on a new distribution of the weighting of votes between the countries. .
"Not normal to finish at 5 o'clock in the morning"
Unlike today, there was no President of the European Council, a sort of summit conductor, a role currently performed by the former Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel. The French leader, Jacques Chirac, then chaired the sessions. On the fourth day, he did everything he could to come to an agreement and put all the outstanding issues on the table at a breakneck pace. Result: the Belgian delegation, annoyed at not seeing its position on the voting rights of its country sufficiently considered, slammed the door of the meeting. It had indeed been forced to drop out compared to the Netherlands, becoming a smaller country in terms of votes. Several times the summit failed to tip over. But in the end Belgium gave up the resistance. "To make them accept the dropout vis-à-vis the Netherlands, we sold him all the European councils in Brussels," recalls one of the participants. Exhausted, Chirac then called for a reform of the Union's working methods. "It is not normal to finish at 5 am," he had noticed then.
Catering versus canteen
But nothing has changed. The night work sessions continue, the summits have multiplied and with 27 member countries of the Union, it is even less easy to find a compromise. One detail remains from the Nice marathon: the buffet offered by the French presidency, prepared by a renowned French caterer known for its macaroons, remember the journalists who covered the event. Those days are over. From now on, meals are served in the canteen of the European Council building by a specialized company and they are chargeable. And for the extraordinary summit dedicated to reviving the economy, the pandemic struck: it was impossible to organize a press room for health security reasons and the press was therefore asked to stay at home.