A few hours into tense talks to abolish mobile roaming fees for Europeans, Parliament negotiators threatened to walk out if tiny Malta didn’t start bullying heavyweights Germany and France.

Malta, as president of the Council, was brokering the third and final round of talks on behalf of 27 other member nations. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker needed the pact to show consumers how the European Union makes life simpler.

The Maltese ultimately wanted a deal, despite being the main beneficiary of the higher fees. Germany and France, too, wanted prices to stay high, but they were thwarted as Malta committed to a midnight deal inside the European Parliament.

“If Council wasn’t willing to reduce its demands, people were willing to walk out,” said a source in the room. “We had to get the commitment from the Maltese that they actually wanted a deal last night.”

The negotiations started at 6:30 p.m. and blew through the 10:30 p.m. deadline without dinner or an agreement. Parliament’s chief negotiator Miapetra Kumpula-Natri snacked on Haribo candies during the six-hour talks.

EU diplomats, Commission officials and members of the Parliament started the evening in their seats, but by midnight were huddled in a corner of the Council’s negotiating room searching for a compromise.

The plan almost died last September, just days before Juncker’s state of the union speech, when an argument over the fine print broke out and pushed everyone back to the drawing board.

Four months later, parliamentarians, EU diplomats and the Commission were still an ocean apart on the maximum prices telecoms operators could charge each other as customers traveled across a competitor’s network. A pair three-way negotiations earlier in January ended without success.

Council, under pressure from Germany and France, wanted the fees to be capped at €10 per gigabyte, dropping by €1 a year until 2021. Parliament wanted them to start at €4 and eventually fall to €1.

As negotiations approached midnight, Malta defied two of the EU’s strongest members and push for a deal that benefited Baltic and Scandinavian nations at the expense of Germany and France, which wanted to protect their mobile operators and their high retail prices, according to people in the room. Although Malta is the EU member that would benefit most from the higher fees, the island nation wanted a deal.

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“It was horse-trading. Parliament would move a bit and Council would then move forward,” said one of the sources in the room.

Eventually, they agreed to cap the fees at €7.70 starting June 15, decreasing to €6 as of January 1, 2018. The fees will slide to €4.5 per gigabyte in 2019, €3.5 in 2020, €3 in 2021 and then to €2.5 in 2022.

“Reforms to the wholesale market, covering telecom operators’ costs, will ensure big operators won’t need to send large bills on to the little ones,” said ALDE MEP Jens Rohde of Denmark.

MEP Kumpula-Natri was one of the first to react, using Twitter to say “goodbuy” to the fees. Official statements from Parliament emerged 5:30 a.m., while the Council commented as most in Europe settled into their morning coffee.

“We are relieved that EU legislators have shown ambition to deliver on their promise to end roaming charges,” said Monique Goyens, director general of consumer group BEUC.

Without a deal, it would have been impossible for President Juncker to end roaming fees and he would have faced the embarrassment of failing to deliver on one of the EU’s loudest political promises. The Commission’s political leader pledged to end roaming charges during hits 2014 election campaign.

Strangely, though, he was silent on his political victory.