European Union leaders have clashed over the fate of the Common Agricultural Policy and other traditional funds doled out from the Brussels purse, in negotiations to piece together the union’s new seven-year budget.
Governments are split on the size of the overall budget package, and where funds should be allocated or cut.
A summit bringing together EU leaders saw prime ministers and presidents restate their red lines, heading into what will be a fractious number of months to hammer out a deal.
Several leaders repeated calls for the next EU budget to direct substantially more funding towards defence and efforts to “rearm” Europe’s militaries, in light of the Russian threat.
Multiple diplomats and senior EU officials said discussions at the European Council summit on Thursday evening were not expected to lead to any breakthrough, but instead increase the pressure on governments to eventually shift closer towards a compromise.
The negotiations will decide how much money will be set aside for CAP payments for farmers, “cohesion” funding to develop roads and infrastructure in poorer regions, overseas development aid, spending on defence and border control, and a jumbo fund to boost Europe’s economy.
The next EU budget will run from 2028 until 2034, but European leaders are pushing to agree a deal on the size of the package, and how it would be funded, by the end of this year.
“It is a challenging task because there is a real divergence of opinion between those who want a lower budget and those who want a higher budget, and those who want to protect traditional programmes … and those who want a modern, outward-looking Europe,” Taoiseach Micheál Martin said.
The Government was “never going to please everybody” with its proposed revision to move the budget talks forward, he said.
Ireland, in its deal-making role holding the presidency of the Council of the EU, suggested trimming back the scale of a draft €1.7 trillion budget package.
It is understood European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told leaders some of the cuts in Ireland’s proposal were hard to understand.
The head of the union’s executive arm singled out changes that would limit the next budget’s flexibility, leaving less room for Brussels to respond to unexpected crises over the seven-year period.
Dublin saw its job as narrowing the gap between EU states who want a bigger, more ambitious European budget, and fiscally conservative governments who favour sweeping cuts.
A coalition of “frugal” states – Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria – want the draft budget to be cut by several hundred billion euro.
Many of that group favour slashing funding for CAP and cohesion development schemes. That would leave more money to put towards what they view as “modern” priorities such as defence, migration control and economic competitiveness.
A larger group, made up of Italy, Spain, Poland and many eastern and southern states, want CAP and the other traditional planks of the EU budget to be protected.
[ Ireland’s EU presidency proposes budget cut of €141bn for the blocOpens in new window ]
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Romanian president Nicușor Dan brought this like-minded group together for a pre-summit huddle, where the leaders underlined their demands to “safeguard” CAP and cohesion funding.
They also committed to keep pushing for the joint budget to have “sufficient resources” to address Europe’s common priorities, Meloni and Dan said.
The Irish Government has handed the job of piecing together a final deal over to António Costa, the European Council president who chairs the summits of national leaders.
The joint budget is predominantly financed by national contributions based on the size of each member states’ economy. Governments are separately fighting over ways they could raise additional revenue at EU level to fill some of the shortfall between the bloc’s big ambitions and what member states are willing to pay.