The European Parliament has agreed on the budget headings and amounts for the 2025 draft budget plan. By setting commitment appropriations at almost €201 billion, it is proposing €1.24 billion more than the European Commission (see EUROPE 13435/5).
In adopting the budget headings, the European Parliament has therefore supported the compromises reached by the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgets for the 2025 budget. “We believe that the EU budget for 2025 should focus on investment”, advocated the rapporteur for the 2025 budget, Victor Negrescu (S&D, Romanian), rejecting the position of the Council of the EU, which he said “corresponds to an austerity budget”.
Increased funding has been requested for “essential programmes” such as Erasmus+, EU4Health and Cluster Health under the Horizon Europe research framework programme, as well as for agricultural programmes and the Civil Protection Mechanism.
The European Parliament advocates adequate funding for youth, farmers, SMEs, education, health, research, infrastructure, security and humanitarian aid. MEPs want the EU budget to respond to current challenges such as the consequences of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the green and digital transition and supporting the economic recovery.
The increase in repayment costs for the post-Covid-19 European Recovery Plan must not result in cuts to programme funding, says the European Parliament. It wants to use the cascade mechanism for paying interest under Next Generation EU, which was introduced at the mid-term review of the MFF in February 2024 to deal with rising interest rates (see EUROPE 13345/21).
The motion for a resolution was rejected. However, the MEPs were unable to reach agreement on the political priorities to be given to the 2025 budget. The EPP group’s support for amendments submitted by the far right (ESN, Patriots for Europe) prompted four of the five pro-European groups (Renew Europe, S&D, Greens/EFA and The Left) to reject the motion for a resolution as a whole (233 in favour, 360 against, 59 abstentions).
Germany’s Alexander Jungbluth and Poland’s Stanisław Tyszka had succeeded, on behalf of the ESN group and with the support of the Patriots for Europe and the EPP, in pushing through the “request for adequate funding of external physical barriers at the EU border” (329 votes in favour, 297 against, 15 abstentions) as well as the invitation “to consider the establishment of return platforms outside the Union and, if necessary, to grant appropriate funding to the project”. Julien Sanchez and Angélique Furet, on behalf of Patriots for Europe, also secured the adoption of an amendment to strengthen the European agency Frontex “by increasing appropriations for the recruitment of permanent agents equipped with service weapons to help Member States control external borders”.
Andrzej Halicki MEP (EPP, Polish) was delighted that, for the first time, “the budget amendments include a provision on financing physical infrastructure at external borders from the EU budget”. But this “historic moment”, in his view, is not really so, since the rejection of the motion for a resolution renders these political priorities obsolete.
As the resolution is a non-binding political text, its rejection and the resulting absence of a European Parliament position on the 2025 budget does not prevent future negotiations with the EU Council and the European Commission. “The European Parliament resolution sometimes adds constraints to the European Parliament negotiators”, said Victor Negrescu, who says he now has a freer hand.
On a more political level, Mr Negrescu added that his “colleagues felt betrayed, because the EPP did not respect the agreement” of the pro-European majority. For him, the situation could have been avoided, when the amendments at the root of the dispute “did not fall within the scope of the budget”.
By playing “with fire by making a pact with the far right”, Christian Democracy “finds itself isolated in the end”, noted Manon Aubry (The Left, French) on the social network X. According to Saskia Bricmont (Greens/EFA, , Belgian), “it is time [for Ursula von der Leyen] to choose her alliances: the far right and the end of the European Union or the democratic and pro-EU groups”. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)