EU Council position on Community draft budget 2025 presented by EC in June, is expected to become the object of criticism in today's debates from the plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, BTA reported.
Social Democratic Party MEP and EP Vice-President Victor Negrescu criticized the Council in a recent document for cutting €1.52 billion from the Commission's draft budget.
"Each year the Council uses a similar justification for cutting program packages, failing to take into account that the procedural and budgetary circumstances, as well as the social, economic and geopolitical context, have significantly changed," he said. According to the Romanian MEP, such an approach causes misunderstanding.
The EU Council's position on next year's budget foresees a total of EUR 191.53 billion in commitments and EUR 146.21 billion in payments, excluding the appropriations provided for special instruments outside the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF ).
"Next year's budget will play an important role in realizing the EU's long-term priorities and goals. The agreement reached represents a good starting point for negotiations with the EP and we hope that this will allow the budget to be adopted on time. The proposed plan aims to ensure prudent budgeting and leave margins for unforeseen circumstances," said Peter Banay, Hungary's state secretary in charge of budget negotiations.
The Council takes a cautious approach and stresses that it is important that the 2025 budget continues to reflect the EU's solidarity with the people of Ukraine and respond to the related crises.
The Council's position is that the budget for the coming year should be realistic, correspond to real needs, ensure reasonable budgeting, while ensuring sufficient resources to ensure the implementation of EU policies and programs and allow the timely payment of the obligations under this MFF.
The Council also expressed its satisfaction that the draft budget for 2025 is aligned with the results of the agreement on the review of the EU MFF for the period 2021–2027
In this sense, the Council also highlighted the need for appropriate financing of the priorities defined in the revision of the MFF, taking into account the budgetary implementation of all programs and the change of priorities when necessary.
The EC proposed in June an EU budget of €199.7 billion for 2025, to be supplemented by payments of approximately €72 billion under the Next Generation programme. (NextGenerationEU), thus the total amount will amount to over 270 billion euros.
In the draft budget, 53.8 billion euros are earmarked for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and 49.2 billion euros for regional development and cohesion.
The European Commission also proposes that 16.3 billion euros be set aside "to support partners and interests" of the World Community
Separately, nearly 2.7 billion euros have been earmarked for pre-accession funds and support for the countries of the Western Balkans. 1.9 billion euros are set aside for humanitarian aid.
About 4.3 billion euros in the form of grants, as well as a little over 10 billion euros in the form of financing, are planned to support Ukraine.
Over 13 billion euros is planned by the EC for investments in development activity.
The European Parliament's priorities for the 2025 EU budget, the first annual budget since the revision of the MFF, include more support for the green and digital transition, competitiveness and ensuring prosperity, inclusion and security.
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Source: www.bta.bg