The eurozone’s budget rules are being called into question as rival views emerge on how to generate jobs and growth. After a Eurogroup meeting on Thursday (19 June), Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who heads the Eurogroup, said that the eurozone was entering a “new phase” with an agenda “focusing very strongly on growth and jobs” and on implementing structural reforms.

However, leaders of Europe’s centre-left government, including François Hollande, the president of France, and Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, sounded a different note after a meeting in Paris on Saturday (21 June).

Hollande and Renzi said they would tacitly support Jean-Claude Juncker as a European Commission president, provided the Commission reviewed its interpretation of eurozone budget rules. Renzi expanded on this to Italy’s parliament on Tuesday (24 June), emphasising that the country would continue to comply with European Union rules limiting deficits to 3% of gross domestic product, but demanding that the method of calculating the deficit change. This could allow certain public pro-growth investments to be discounted, he suggested.

Italy’s assumption of the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers as of 1 July will give Renzi greater powers to set the EU agenda and a powerful platform from which to make his case. Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s centre-left deputy chancellor and economy minister, surprised his centre-right coalition partners when he joined Arnaud Montebourg, France’s economy minister, last week in arguing that eurozone members should get more time to fall into line with EU budget rules.

The Commission currently predicts that France will miss the 3% target again in 2015. Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany’s central bank and previously Merkel’s sherpa at international meetings, responded on Tuesday, arguing that the crisis had demonstrated that the fiscal rules needed to be tightened, not weakened. He questioned France’s and Italy’s commitment to reform. Merkel has described changes to the budget pact as inconceivable.

The centre-left governments realise that violating the rules would be unacceptable to other eurozone members, so they talk about changing the interpretation given to them, according to Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy. Such a change of tack would appear broadly acceptable to the European Central Bank. Benoît Coeuré, a member of the ECB’s executive board, said on Friday that the eurozone budget pact “is flexible enough to account for the short-term cost of structural reforms, but it should not be stretched to the point where it would lose its credibility. Let us not repeat the error of 2003,” referring to a Council decision not to fine Germany and France when they breached the pact’s terms.

Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, was blunt in his comments on Friday, speaking at his last press conference as commissioner before taking up his seat as an MEP: “The greatest service that could be done”, he said, would be “for Italy and France to intensify structural reforms and take forward fiscal consolidation […] and for Germany to take steps to sustain demand.” But he noted that the EU budget rules were scheduled to be reviewed at the end of 2015, which would provide a framework to debate the issues.

Rewriting the rules appears to be the option favoured by the IMF. The eurozone budget pact “has become excessively complicated with multiple objectives and targets”, it wrote in its annual review of the eurozone economy, presented to finance ministers on Friday. It also said that the current rules might discourage public investment and called on the ECB to introduce quantitative easing unless economic conditions improved – both points that are unlikely to ingratiate the fund with Berlin.

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