“We have been opposing these national envelopes for six months and the European Commission is presenting them anyway”, said Fabienne Keller (Renew Europe, French), referring to the Commission’s working document on the post-2027 MFF which was leaked on Wednesday 12 March (see EUROPE 13598/5).
The French MEP, shadow rapporteur on the European Parliament’s own-initiative report on the MFF, sees this nationalisation of the EU budget as a way of “managing the famine". It would be easier to save money, in a “tighter budget”, by bringing some of the programmes together “in a package”.
One of the concerns is that certain objectives will be abandoned along the way. By abandoning the definition of strategies “with objectives and resources to match”, there is a risk of “mixing everything up”, Fabienne Keller regretted.
More generally, these national plans open a breach in the philosophy of a budget based on shared European objectives, deplored the former senator and mayor of Strasbourg. “We are losing the ability to steer public policy, at least on a European scale”, she added.
Moreover, this risk of losing governance and monitoring the use of the budget was noted by the European Court of Auditors in autumn 2024, in the context of the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’, the mechanism that inspired this potential post-2027 overhaul of the MFF. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)