On Tuesday 1 July, the European Socialists and Democrats (S&D) set out their demands for the next multiannual financial framework to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The S&D warned that it would oppose the draft national plan for each EU Member State in the next multiannual financial framework, and called for a “strong, distinct and autonomous” European Social Fund+ (ESF+) and a “much more ambitious and better resourced” MFF.
Nor should the approach to the national plan be based on the ‘pay for reform’ rule, the S&D insisted. If these national plans were to come into being, the S&D called for neither cohesion policy nor the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to be diluted.
According to the S&D, ESF+ is an “essential condition” for the implementation of the ‘European pillar of social rights’. For this reason, the political group urges Mrs von der Leyen to increase the funding. The S&D also opposed the merging of ESF+ objectives into national and regional partnership plans.
To guarantee a more ambitious EU budget in the long term, the S&D sees no other solution than the adoption of new EU own resources and recourse to a new common loan. In its position paper on the MFF, published in mid-June (see EUROPE 13663/8), the EPP made the loan conditional on the financing of policies with “high European added value”.
In general, the political group calls on the European Commission to take into account the requests made in May in the European Parliament’s own-initiative report (see EUROPE 13635/1).
See the letter: https://aeur.eu/f/hno (Original version in French by Florent Servia)