Clocks in Finland will move back one hour on Sunday night, for what was meant to be the last time.
In 2019, the European Parliament voted by a clear majority of 410-192 to end the practice of Daylight Saving Time permanently from 2021.
The process then moved to the EU Council of Ministers, where a final decision is still pending.
"The EU Council has 27 member states, each with their own internal discussions and reports. There are no concrete positions as yet on whether the practice of changing clocks will end," Maria Rautavirta from Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications told Yle, adding that the Covid pandemic has slowed progress even further.
"Certainly it has affected the kind of issues that are raised on the agenda in the negotiations. All urgent matters have been prioritised and others have been moved to wait for slightly less busy times," she said.
Although Finnish authorities are in favour of ending the practice, other EU member states are not so keen. Rautavirta pointed out that the EU Council has not discussed the issue since Finland's six-month stint as president of the Council of the European Union in 2019.
Opinions on the issue are divided, both between and within member states, and Rautavirta added that not all nations see the changing of clocks to be either necessary or topical.
"No country has taken the debate forward. At the moment, there is no prospect of an EU Presidency for which the issue is so important that it would be put on the agenda," the ministry official said.
Summer time or winter time?
The biannual practice of changing clocks — forward in spring and back in autumn — has been uniformly regulated throughout the EU since 2002, and was already widely practiced prior to that.
Finland has followed the custom since 1981, and was the last of the European countries to do so.
Clocks are changed in all EU member states on the same day and at the same time, to avoid any confusion regarding international train and air traffic, for example. The changes are always made on the last Sunday of March and of October.
If the practice does end, each EU member state will be free to choose which time zone it wishes to belong to, meaning Finland's government would need to decide whether to propose adopting either summer or winter time as the official, permanent standard.
The matter would then ultimately be decided by a vote in Parliament.
According to Yle's information, the government would be likely to collect the opinions of experts in the field, as well as those of the public. The Ministry of Justice conducted a survey into people's preferences in 2018, where a small majority were found to be in favour of making winter time permanent.
Separately, a citizens' initiative in 2019 that called for the government to permanently change to summer time received over 50,000 signatures.
However, according to Rautavirta, the decision will be influenced by many different factors.
"We consider it important to look at how our neighbouring countries intend to proceed," she said, adding that the proposal is unlikely to advance in the EU's Council of Ministers until at least next year.
This means that the practice of changing clocks back and forth is set to remain for a few more years, at least.