The EU has issued stern warnings to France, Spain and Italy that they must hold unwaveringly to their budgets for 2014, or risk missing targets seen as key for the whole eurozone.
The European Commission, wielding new watchdog powers designed to ward off a repeat debt crisis, cleared France's draft 2014 spending plans in advance of parliamentary scrutiny, but warned there was "no margin" for slippage in reducing the Paris deficit.
The EU executive also identified considerable dangers in figures supplied by the governments in Rome and Madrid - a day after Spain, like Ireland, announced it would do without an international credit line come the January end of its banking bailout.
Imposing its will for the first time in this way on national budgets, EU Economy Commissioner Olli Rehn approved the draft budgets of all 13 eurozone countries which are not in bailout programs - minus Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.
The warnings to France, Spain and Italy, though, underscore a background of fragile and stuttering eurozone recovery from recession, and of big social strains in countries already applying tough measures to correct public finances.
The Commission can't force countries to rewrite their spending plans - but after issuing such warnings, the executive need not tip-toe around in future assessments of progress measured against benchmarks agreed by all EU governments.
Tensions are now rising strongly in France, and the latest Commission reminder follows a number of recent critical reports on the outlook for French reforms.
The Commission said measures contained in the French government's 2014 budget suggest "adequate progress" towards an extended 2015 deadline for meeting the European Union's deficit ceiling, "albeit with no margin."
France is the eurozone's second-biggest economy, but French output shrank in the third quarter according to the latest growth figures.
The government in Paris made only "limited progress" in 2013 in tackling root budgetary issues, the Commission said.
French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, in Brussels for two days of talks among eurozone and EU counterparts, said the verdict amounted to a seal of approval for French policy on public finances.
"It's a sort of certification of the seriousness and the credibility of France's budgetary policy," Moscovici said after Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg flagged up "really worrying" developments in France.
France has obtained a two-year extension to a previous deadline for achieving deficit targets, and was supposed to post deficit figures of 3.9 per cent of gross domestic product for 2013, 3.6 per cent for 2014 and 2.8 per cent for 2015.
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