The EU’s next long-term budget needs to be flexible, simpler, and better targeted. In essence, the priorities developed by the European Commission in its ‘Roadmap’ confirm what was already announced at the end of January by the European Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration, Piotr Serafin, before the European Parliament (see EUROPE 13568/24), and in October 2024 in his mission statement (see EUROPE 13511/18).
The main issue with regard to the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) post-2027 is the start of repayments for the Next Generation EU loan, which was contracted under the post-Covid-19 Recovery Plan. Consulted and published by Agence Europe on Tuesday 11 February, the European Commission’s ‘Roadmap’ puts the amount needed to repay this loan and associated interest at between €20 billion and €35 billion per year. “This is almost 20% of the current annual budget”, according to the European Commission.
Unsurprisingly, the European Commission repeats that, under these conditions, “there cannot be an EU budget fit for our ambitions and notably ensuring [...] stable national financial contributions, without introducing new own resources”. The European Commission is therefore calling on the Council of the EU to “urgently resume its work” on the package of new own resources it has submitted and which the European Parliament has already adopted (see EUROPE 13289/10).
The other revolution in the next MFF will be in its structure, since in order to be more efficient and better able to deal with crises, the European Commission intends to reduce the existing “over 50 spending programmes” into three funds: single national plans for each Member State, a European fund for competitiveness, and a revised fund for foreign policy.
Revealed through a leak of a working document in October 2024 (see EUROPE 13498/11), the idea of national strategic plans will make it possible to focus the EU’s investment budget on performance, by making EU payments conditional on Member States implementing previously discussed reforms, as was the case with the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’.
Freed from its fifty or so spending programmes, the EU budget would also be better placed to rapidly and effectively respond to crises such as those encountered in recent years (Covid-19, the energy crisis, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine), according to the European Commission.
In addition, according to the institution, the existence of a single entry point for access to EU funding would make life easier for beneficiaries, while also lowering the administrative burden.
The ‘European Competitiveness Fund’ aims to support investment in critical sectors, with a view to strengthening the competitiveness of the European Union on the world stage. Again for reasons of efficiency, the pooling of EU Member States’ external funding by means of a revised foreign policy fund will include development aid, international cooperation, and foreign policy initiatives.
The European Commission also presented the EU spending priorities for the next MFF: defence; protection of the EU’s external borders; inclusive growth and territorial cohesion; modernisation of agriculture; preparations for climate disasters; adapting to an unprecedented geopolitical context.
These priorities should be approached by the Member States as “common challenges where spending at European level brings the highest added value”. The European Commission is calling for greater synergies between the policies of Member States.
The European coordination that was put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic with regard to vaccines, and the coordination actioned during the energy crisis that saw an increase in the use of renewable energies, are cited as examples. On the contrary, the European Commission pointed out that “Member States are still far from achieving the benchmark they set for themselves over 15 years ago to invest 35% together on European collaborative projects” in the defence field. The new organisation of the MFF should remedy this situation.
The European Commission is yet to propose an amount, but their ‘Roadmap’ is a first step towards a definitive proposal, scheduled for July 2025.
See the ‘Roadmap’: https://aeur.eu/f/fg6 (Original version in French by Florent Servia)