EU Budget 2014-2020

A vote of resignation

Published on 20 November 2013 at 14:52

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"Europe will get its money," reports Luxembourg daily Luxemburger Wort. The European Parliament approved the EU's 2014-2020 budget by a vote of 537 to 126, on November 19. The budget was slashed by €38.2bn compared with the 2007-2013 budget.

"For the first time, the EU's budget envelope is reduced (€960bn for commitment appropriations and €908bn in payment appropriations) at a time when Brussels' tasks are increasing," notes French business daily Les Echos, adding that the MEPs voted with "resignation".

This is because, reports Spanish daily El País, after "nine months of intense negotiations" between European institutions and member states, "the EU approved the first budget cut of its history". Furthermore, the 3.5 per cent budget cut was imposed by the member states:

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Several years after the implementation of the bitter pill of austerity in EU countries, the EU budget itself has not escaped from this trend, [but] backroom deals allow all parties to claim victory. On the one hand, EU leaders made the political gesture of reducing spending [...] On the other hand, the Parliament hangs on to two main conditions that it has grappled from the member states: greater flexibility in the attribution of EU funds, which, if not spent in the scheduled year, could be transferred to the budget of the next year or be reattributed to other parties and a review of the budget framework in 2016, at which time modifications could be proposed depending on the economic situation.

This EU budget "does not respond to the crisis," warns Belgian daily Le Soir. The paper interviewed Fabian Zuleeg, chief economist at the European Policy Centre, who says that:

The EU budget remains built around two traditional pillars (the Common Agriculture Policy and Cohesion Funds). This budget is not conceived to respond to the crisis: we have the same budget that would have been devised if there were no crisis. [Yet,] there has been an increase for items dedicated to the policies of the future such as research and European networks. This is marginal, but in the long term, it will launch a rebalancing of budget lines.

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