Austria’s Finance Minister has criticised the latest compromise to reform the European Union’s fiscal rules, stating it lacks ambition.

EU presidency holder Spain presented a compromise on the so-called Stability and Growth Pact at the beginning of the month. However, as Austria continues to oppose the reform, Spain said an agreement will not be reached before November.

“The reform proposal for the Stability Pact is not yet ambitious enough,” Finance Minister Magnus Brunner told Handelsblatt on Monday.

“Of course, it must be possible to take on more debt in difficult times, but this must also be balanced out again,” Brunner went on to say.

The European Commission intends to reform the EU’s fiscal rules by the end of 2023 to grant increased flexibility in terms of reducing debt. The reforms include country-specific approaches, as opposed to one system, to help southern member states with comparatively high debt ratios, Euractiv reports.

However, Austria’s Finance Minister said that the pace set out in the reforms is still “too slow.”

“The danger of backroom deals is high,” he stated, going on to add that if there were to be an “individual arrangement” for countries, “there would have to be very transparent, rule-based and uniform guidelines.”

Debt reduction would be especially important as “this is how a country creates budgetary leeway for real times of need”, Brunner said.

Austria and other countries within the EU have been opposed to a reform of the stringent budgetary rules for some time.

Indeed, Germany – since Christian Linder (FDP) took over the German finance ministry in 2021 – has led calls for strict fiscal regulations and has rebuffed their reform.