(Bloomberg) -- The European Commission told five countries including Italy and France that their draft budgets for 2020 risk breaching the euro area’s fiscal rules.

The European Union’s executive arm sent letters to Rome and Paris as well as to the governments in Spain, Portugal and Belgium demanding further clarifications on the draft plans they submitted to Brussels earlier in October. The letter to Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that France is set to fall short of EU recommendations for improving it’s structural budget position and for limiting spending increases.

"These elements don’t appear to conform to the budget-policy obligations," the letter said. "This points to a risk of a significant deviation from the budgetary effort required."

French President Emmanuel Macron has ramped up spending and lowered taxes in response to the Yellow-Vest protests that rocked the country at the beginning of the year. The commission has to study the budgets of all 19 euro-area members and issue an opinion on whether they’re compliant with EU rules in November.

The letters mark a standard step in the long process of reviewing national budgets and don’t mean they will be rejected. Last year, the commission wrote to six countries demanding further clarifications and eventually only asked Italy to submit new spending plans, a move that triggered a prolonged standoff between Brussels and the populist coalition in Rome.

Belgium, Spain and Portugal are all asked to provide clarifications as the budget plans they submitted foresee no change in policy - a standard move for countries that are in the middle of an election season or have caretaker governments.

Under EU rules, no country should have a deficit larger than 3% of gross domestic product or debt above 60% of output, and governments are required to set annual targets to show they’re moving in the right direction. Even if their plans don’t breach the headline deficit target, they could still run foul of the EU if the shortfall doesn’t narrow at an acceptable pace.

While Italy’s deficit is well within the 3% limit, the commission has demanded smaller gaps for the country to bring down its debt load, which at more than 130% of GDP is second only to Greece within Europe. France, Belgium and Spain are among the many countries that have received warnings or reprimands from the EU in recent years, though never a formal rejection of their draft budget or any financial sanctions.

To contact the reporter on this story: Viktoria Dendrinou in Brussels at vdendrinou@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Vidya Root

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