EU budget negotiators slam frugal states over grand ambitions talk while calling for cuts

European ministers are meeting 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. Two of parliament’s three lead negotiators on the file, who will be in the room, told EUobserver that they are not impressed by how some member states have handled the debate so far. “In principle, there is more common ground than divisions,” Siegfried Mureşan, a Romanian MEP for the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), told EUobserver. “There is broad agreement on strengthening competitiveness and security while protecting farmers and regions.” But some member states are pushing for major cuts to the budget while also calling for increased ambition in the parts of the budget they do like, which he said was the problem. “The problem lies in the huge discrepancy between the words and actions of some member states in the Council. We cannot all agree that the EU needs to do more while calling for a weaker budget,” Mureşan said. While not mentioning any of the countries by name, his comment referred to the so-called ‘frugal countries’, led by Germany and including the Netherlands and the Nordic states, that want more EU spending on defence and competitiveness but want to cut the budget by “hundreds of billions,” in German chancellor Friedrich Merz’ words. Defence vs poor regions? On the other side are a group of member states known as the ‘friends of cohesion’, which includes Spain and Italy, that want to protect farm subsidies and payouts to poorer regions from cuts. Asked where he thought the balance should be struck between the two groups’ demands, Mureşan said that the size of the budget as proposed by the Cypriot presidency in June should not be messed with any further.