EU budget commissioner Piotr Serafin told the bloc’s so-called ‘frugal’ member states to rethink their push for a smaller seven-year budget, saying that a one large budget packs more punch that 27 smaller ones.
“Nobody would argue that 27 earth observation systems would be a better idea than Copernicus, or would be better off developing its own satellite system instead of having Galileo,” Serafin said in his opening speech at the European Commission’s annual budget conference on Thursday (2 July).
Less spending at the EU level doesn’t translate to less spending overall, just “more national spending,” he added.
His remarks come as Germany, the Netherlands and other net payers including Austria, Denmark and Sweden, press the incoming Irish presidency of the EU Council to cut the bloc’s next seven-year budget far more deeply than Cyprus proposed.
On Tuesday, Germany proposed cutting the commission’s proposed €2 trillion budget by roughly €400bn — about a fifth. That is ten times the size of the roughly two-percent trim in Cyprus’s negotiating box.
But Serafin tried to turn the frugals’ own thrift against them by saying that a smaller EU budget does not automatically mean a cheaper one for taxpayers.
“The alternative to European spending is more national spending,” he said, adding that defence, energy security and research “will have to be financed one way or another.”
Doing so separately "means a higher bill, more duplication, and fewer economies of scale,” he also said.
Case in point, he said, was the EU's Horizon research programme, set to rise from around €90bn in the current budget to €175bn under the commission's 2028-2034 proposal.
Wester van Gaal