Margarida Marques MEP (S&D, Portuguese) said on Tuesday 20 June, after the presentation of the package of proposals on the mid-term review of the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2021-2027, that the European Commission had listened to the European Parliament by providing “more money” for EU policies that need it.
The MEP, who is also a rapporteur on the MFF, welcomed the fact that the Commission had proposed to provide “new money” so that the EU budget could meet new needs.
An additional €100 billion is planned for the current MFF, which is almost the same as the European Parliament’s initial requests, pointed out Ms Marques. She expressed the hope that the European Council would agree to revise the MFF.
She also defended Cohesion Policy against criticism from Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, who said that “cohesion has the money, but not the projects”. Cohesion has projects, retorted Ms Marques.
Jan Olbrycht (EPP, Polish), another rapporteur, noted that the Commission had sought to remedy its past mistake by removing the additional cost of higher interest rates on money borrowed to finance Next Generation EU from the main budget lines by placing it above the MFF ceilings. “If this problem is not solved, we risk seeing a drop of billions of euros for flagship programmes such as Erasmus+”, he warned. He said it was “disappointing” that the total cost of debt under the economic recovery instrument had not been fully removed from the main budget lines.
“The Commission spends more on administration than on defence. We could perhaps be a little more ambitious when it comes to defence and security. However, overall, compared to what we feared, the pressure we applied was quite effective for the revision of the MFF”, commented Valérie Hayer (Renew Europe, French).
The big surprise, in her view, is the new money - €10 billion - for the sovereign wealth fund. “It’s a start: we’ll have to increase this envelope because we can’t really say that we’re going to build our strategic sovereignty with just €10 billion”, she added.
As far as ‘ETS revenues’ are concerned, 30% of the revenues generated by the EU Emissions Trading System will go to the EU budget (up from 25%), “which means an additional €1 billion in revenues per year”. Adding the revenue from the ‘carbon market’ (€6 billion) and the ‘carbon tax’, the total comes to €7 billion a year. “This is nowhere near enough to repay the €20 billion recovery fund by 2028”, concluded Ms Hayer. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur and Pauline Denys)