Covid relief, the war in Ukraine and rapidly rising inflation are causing Brussels’ pots of money to shrink. The Commission now wants more money from member states – and taxes from the EU.
Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen put it bluntly: the EU has a money problem. “We had one crisis after another for three years,” the president of the European Commission said on Tuesday. “And of course, this world of multiple crises is also reflected in our budget. We need to get our budget on a stable funding path.”
For this, von der Leyen would like almost €66 billion more through 2027. Measured against the entire budget for the current 2021-2027 funding period, that would be just around six percent. Converted into political explosives, though, it’s a huge amount. Several net contributing states, most notably Germany and the Netherlands, already stated before the budget proposals were submitted to the Commission that they could only agree to additional funds for financial support to Ukraine against the Russian war of annihilation. For Finance Minister Magnus Brunner (ÖVP), even that is too much. The budget situation in Austria is “tense”. The federal government has had to “assemble aid packages of historic proportions” since 2020. Ukraine’s financial needs must first be covered by “existing possibilities”.