Members of the European Parliament called for greater funding for civil and military transport infrastructure at a plenary session debate in Strasbourg on Wednesday 2 April. They voiced support for expanding the ‘Connecting Europe Facility’ (CEF).
“The CEF is four to five times oversubscribed and the investment gap is huge”, warned Jens Gieseke (EPP, German). “The Council’s proposal to reduce the budget line by 80% sends the wrong signal”, he said. He would like to see a rapid restructuring of the current Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) to make more funds available for infrastructure development, and sustainable, targeted funding for this area in the next MFF.
Jan-Christoph Oetjen (Renew Europe, German) also called for the next MFF to include “a specific instrument with sufficient funding to promote investment in military and dual-use infrastructures”.
For Merja Kyllönen (The Left, Finnish), the EU must not abandon the coordination of networks and the CEF. “The trans-European transport network (TEN-T) is the main EU-wide network ensuring that the main modes of transport work together and can move at any time and in any place. Let’s build cooperation with military mobility, but let’s stick to cooperation, networks and financial instruments”, she stressed.
Kai Tegethoff (Greens/EFA, German) insisted on investment in a modern cross-border rail infrastructure for the benefit of citizens, the economy and safety. “We therefore need to complete the TEN-T network as soon as possible”, he said.
The PfE and ECR groups deplored the fact that interest in this subject had come too late. Roberts Zīle (ECR, Latvian) noted that “in the summer of 2020, when the multiannual financial framework for this seven-year period was adopted by the European Council, military mobility was reduced considerably, from an initial amount of €6 billion to zero, and then, with the help of the European Commission, increased to €1.5 billion”.
At their informal meeting in Warsaw in mid-March, the European Transport Ministers agreed that the MFF should be amended and that it was important to retain and develop the CEF (see EUROPE 13602/2). (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)