European ministers meet in Dublin on Thursday (3 September) to decide which parts of the EU’s next seven-year budget deserve more money and which deserve less.
The current Irish EU-presidency has prepared a document hoping to “aid consideration” and smooth over differences that have gridlocked negotiations since June.
The aim is to appease two opposing groups of member states while defending a larger budget compared to the current one, albeit less ambitious than the one proposed by the commission.
The lay of the land is as follows: the ‘frugal countries’, including Germany, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, all of which pay more into the EU budget than they receive, want a much smaller budget than the €1.73 trillion tabled by the Cypriot presidency in June.
On the other side are a group of member states known as the ‘friends of cohesion’, which includes Spain and Italy and is chiefly concerned with protecting farm subsidies and payouts to poorer regions.
