Negotiators from the European Parliament and the EU member states have agreed on an EU budget for 2024, it was announced on Saturday evening. Accordingly, the EU can make commitments worth €189.4 billion and disburse up to €142.6 billion.
State Secretary Florian Tursky (ÖVP), who was at the negotiating table for Austria, sees this as “a balanced middle ground between thrift and flexibility for the unforeseen.”
360 million euros “buffer”
As the Council writes in its press release, this gives the EU a margin of €360 million to respond to unforeseen needs.
According to Tursky, the 2024 budget has increased funding for programs such as Erasmus+ and Horizon. To achieve this, cutbacks have been made on projects such as the ITER nuclear test reactor. The State Secretary also positively assesses that the additional personnel costs requested by Parliament would have been reduced by two-thirds.
EU summit in December
A sticking point in the negotiations was Parliament’s request to link discussions on the 2024 budget to those on the current multiannual financial framework (MFF 2021-2027), which was rejected by the Council. The MFF will be discussed at a meeting of heads of state and government in December.
The European Commission’s proposal included €189.3 billion in commitments and €143.1 billion in payments. With these figures, the Brussels authority stood between the ideas of Parliament and those of the Council, the institution of the EU states. The Council called for €187 billion in commitments and €141 billion in payments.
Source: Krone
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