🇪🇺 Von der Leyen warns against EU budget cuts

Commission president dismissed Germany’s calls for big savings, arguing that they would undermine EU-wide priorities.

During a speech in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday, von der Leyen said that reducing the size of the EU’s common cash pot would undermine critical EU-wide priorities such as competitiveness and energy autonomy.

“I would like to caution against large cuts. It would risk cutting deep into critical priorities that we all together have agreed on,” von der Leyen told MEPs.

The warning comes days before the Irish presidency of the Council of the EU, which is steering the budget talks, is expected to put forward a budget negotiating document with new figures.

Germany and its allies in Northern Europe have pressured Dublin to make cuts worth hundreds of billions of euros across the board.

But 17 EU countries from Southern and Eastern Europe — led by Italy and Romania — are pushing in the opposite direction. They asked to preserve farmers’ subsidies and regional payouts, known as cohesion policy, in a joint letter last week.

📝: The war in Ukraine, the push for decarbonisation and the EU's ambition to become a player in the AI race, an endeavour which requires a whole lot of polluting industry, have taken a toll on the Union's budget.

To be able to afford all of these and the programs which generated support for the EU inside and outside of the Union such as the EU's agricultural subsidies and cohesion funds, Brussels will need to increase or introduce new taxes which will harm its prospects for regaining competitivity and prove it is the "global power" it claims to be.

The group of fiscal conservative states led by Germany who pay more to Brussels than they receive in return would prefer to cut the budgets made for agriculture and social cohesion from which states in Eastern and Southern Europe benefit the most and those funds being the engine driving up support for EU membership in the Western Balkans and the Caucasus. Without those funds, EU support in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Turkey would collapse overnight and anti-EU movements will spring up and gain immense traction across much of Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, countries that have been hollowed out by the industrial economies of Western Europe.

If Germany, The Netherlands, France, Austria and Scandinavia aren't willing to continue spending money on Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, then there's no reason for those countries to stay united.

So which will it be?

🔗 https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-warns-against-eu-budget-cuts/