For another year, until the end of 2023, the European Commission wants to suspend the EU budget rules.
The Stability Pact will then be out of force for almost four years.
For four years, no member state has to pretend that the Maastricht debt limits – three percent of economic output for the state deficit, 60 percent for the debt level – mean anything to them.
Even if these values have hardly been observed until now, they still formed a kind of shame limit that the EU states could not simply ignore.
That's over now.
The justification for extending the state of emergency - the weak economic development - is quite absurd.
The EU has put the "severe economic slump" behind it, which justified the suspension in the Corona crisis in 2020.
Just this week, the EU authority forecast growth rates of over two percent for this and the coming year.
And even those who still associate considerable economic risks with the Ukraine war shouldn't have to decree budgetary laissez-faire in advance, so to speak.
Of course, one might say that it has long since ceased to matter whether the pact is formally in force or not.
At the latest since Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and his Commissioner Pierre Moscovici took over the helm in Brussels in 2014, the EU authority has systematically ignored the rules and stopped enforcing them.
Above all, the governments in Paris and Rome want to bury the pact in all formalities and finally.
It is possible that they will now get their wish without the reform of the pact intended by Economic Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni being implemented.
If the states can conduct their budgetary policy for four years without EU guidelines, then by the end of 2023 the normative power of the factual will have finally prevailed.
Debt will then have increased even further, especially in an environment of rising interest rates.
The current Commission hardly has to bear the responsibility for the economic consequences, it will not be in office much longer.