EU leaders met on Friday (19 June) to discuss the bloc’s next seven-year budget, which is expected to become one of the most contentious negotiations of the year.
While governments agreed on innovations to combine funding streams and invest more in defence, energy and innovation, the key question of how high the budget will be is “still under discussion,” an EU official said shortly after negotiations took place.
The commission and parliament want a larger budget than the current one to finance new priorities such as defence, competitiveness and energy security, while largely maintaining existing spending on farmers and economically less-developed regions.
A group of member states known as the ‘friends of cohesion’, made up largely of net recipient countries, are also broadly supportive of a larger budget.
But the rival ‘frugal countries’ — including Germany, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, all of which pay more into the EU budget than they receive — are pushing for a much smaller budget than the almost two trillion euros tabled by the commission.
