Once EU Heads of State or Government had reached a political agreement, the last phase of the 2021 2027 MFF decision-making process began, mainly featuring negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council. In the conclusions of the July 2020 European Council, EU leaders had invited Council ‘to take up negotiations with the European Parliament with a view to ensuring finalisation of work on all legal acts in accordance with the relevant legal basis as a matter of exceptional urgency in order to ensure that the EU can respond to the crisis’. The European Council highlighted that these negotiations should be ‘on the basis of the levels of commitments in this agreement’. On 5 November 2020, Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement on rule-of-law budget conditionality, and then, on 10 November 2020, a political agreement on the MFF. There were, however, difficulties in the adoption procedure in Council. While the vast majority of Member States agreed with the compromise on the table, on 16 November 2020, Poland and Hungary withheld their consent to the launch of a written procedure to adopt the own resources decision. They chose to block this part of the package, with which they have no specific issue, because it requires unanimity in Council for its adoption, while the subject of their true concern, rule of law conditionality, is decided by qualified majority voting.
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