In snappy terms, the European Commission rejected yesterday (30 October) the first proposals containing concrete figures for the EU’s 2014-2020 budget presented hours earlier by the Cypriot presidency. The Parliament slammed the proposal for slashing spending on growth and jobs, while Sweden said much bigger cuts were needed

Figures are difficult to compare with the Commission proposal. For example, the Commission proposes spending €376 billion for cohesion policy (including the CEF). The figure proposed by the Cypriot presidency is €326.5 billion, but it doesn’t include CEF. In the Cyprus proposal, CEF is in a separate sub-heading called “Competitiveness for growth and jobs”. The figure for CEF according to the Cypriot figures is €36.3 billion – the Commission proposed €50 billion.
According to the Cypriot paper, spending on the EU’s poorer regions is to be capped at 2.36% of a recipient country’s economic output, down from the current 2.5%, which will raise eyebrows in the Union’s newer members.
The Erasmus scholarship programme would suffer and also large-scale scientific programmes like ITER (nuclear fusion), GMES and Galileo will be put at risk, the MEPs state.
Swedish EU Affairs Minister Birgitta Ohlson was quoted as saying that no deal would be possible on the basis of cuts of only €50 billion and that reductions of “four times as much” a proposed by the Cypriots were needed “to stabilise member states’ contributions”.

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