The European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) is safe until 2020. The European Parliament has formally adopted the inter-institutional agreement, which is making an exceptional grant of an annual €600,000 on an annual basis to the orchestra until the end of the current financial framework in 2020. Following the recent support given by Coreper it is now up to the Council to do likewise (see EUROPE 11951).
The MEP in charge of the dossier, Silvia Costa (S&D, Italy), welcomed the European Parliament vote and said that this was "a great day for Europe, music and young people".
Founded in 1976, the European Youth Orchestra enables around 50 young Europeans from all the different member states to play together during concerts organised throughout the world. Around 3,000 musicians have so far participated in it. It has been subsidised since its creation but its existence was threatened in 2016 before the Commission came up with a temporary solution (see EUROPE 11839), which the Parliament and Council provisionally agreed on 25 January.
The new regulation comes in the shape of an amendment to the legislation introducing the Creative Europe programme (Regulation1295/2013). It has arranged for an exceptional subsidy to be granted at the end of the Creative Europe programme to the tune of €600,000 a year or a third of the annual orchestra spending up until 2020. In exchange, the orchestra will be obliged to step up its efforts in areas such as development and audience visibility, ensure balanced geographical representation of musicians and work to reduce its dependency on funding from the Union.
And what comes afterwards? In her speech made ahead of the vote, Silvia Costa posed a question with regard to the orchestra's future. In the short-term she mentioned transferring the orchestra's administrative centre to Italy (due to the United Kingdom leaving the EU, which is where the orchestra is currently based) and, in the long term, a change to the next multi-annual financial framework. “Creative Europe accounts for 0.50% of the total EU budget. We need to double this figure”, she said. Commissioner Tibor Navracsics called on the MEPs to put pressure on their governments so that the budget for culture is maintained. The text to the agreement can be seen at the following link: http://bit.ly/2IqeyEu . (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)