17 EU countries are protesting against cuts in the EU budget

17 EU countries are protesting against cuts in the EU budget

This is a reaction to information that the new proposal may involve cuts amounting to hundreds of billions of euros. Germany, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Austria are demanding such a large budget reduction. These countries believe that, given its limited financial resources, the EU should spend less on agriculture or supporting poorer regions, and more on defense, security, new technologies and competitiveness.

17 countries respond: new European priorities cannot be financed at the expense of agriculture and regions.

“This is not the moment for Europe to lower its ambitions,” we read in a letter to the Irish Presidency. The countries demand that the total amount of the future budget remains at least at the current level, i.e. not be reduced compared to the current proposal presented a few months ago by the Cypriot Presidency.

States are very clearly defending the two biggest traditional EU policies. “We therefore believe that the overall financing of cohesion policy and the CAP must be maintained in the next budget,” they write.

"New revenues for the EU budget must not burden poorer countries"

The signatories warn that further cuts will not modernize the EU budget, "they will only weaken it and may undermine public support for the European project." They argue that cohesion policy and agriculture are not an obstacle to the modernization of the Union. On the contrary - they support the development of regions, strengthen the common market, food security and the competitiveness of the European economy.

However, 17 countries are ready to talk about new revenues for the EU budget. However, he sets a condition: they must be "real, fair, simple and non-regressive", which means they cannot burden poorer countries to a greater extent.

This is a demand recently raised by Poland. Warsaw is, among other things, opposed to the idea that part of the revenues from the ETS system would go directly to the EU treasury.

We say very clearly that the new budget's own revenues cannot be regressive, that is, they cannot burden poorer countries more - said Ignacy Niemczycki, deputy head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently.

The decisive phase of negotiations

17 countries also propose a slower repayment of the EU debt incurred to rebuild the economy after the pandemic. In their opinion, this could generate additional money in the new budget perspective. They also allow limited joint EU debt, but only for clearly defined strategic purposes. They also call for the abandonment of the current system of discounts for some countries when making payments to the EU treasury.