Arguing over the EU budget.

Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. Dalia Grybauskaite, Lithuania’s president, is clearly relishing the prospect of fierce arguments about the EU’s future budget cycle after 2013.

At the European Council last week (28-29 October), she delivered a few choice words on the 2011 budget, taking the path of austerity rather than extravagance. It is the misfortune of the European Commission, as it presents its arguments both for the 2011 budget and the post-2013 cycle, that one of the members of the European Council is Grybauskaite, European commissioner for budgets between 2004 and 2009, who will have heard all the arguments before.

The fact that the current incumbent is a Pole, Janusz Lewandowski, will only add piquancy to the discussion.

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