11 countries push for pause on new EU laws

BRUSSELS — Eleven countries, led by Austria, are pushing to pause new EU legislation for 12 months for what the country’s Europe Minister Claudia Bauer described as a “year of simplification.” “We can’t go on tabling new legislative proposals when existing rules have not been fully implemented,” Bauer said in an interview with Brussels Playbook , referring to a discussion paper signed by Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Portugal and Hungary, and seen by POLITICO. Brussels is already scrambling to roll out red-tape-cutting packages known as “omnibuses” — but those efforts don’t go far enough, according to Bauer. “What we are doing now is mostly ex-post simplification,” she said.