site.btaEuropean Parliament to Vote Through 2025 EU Budget

The European Union's draft budget for 2025 is due to be put to a vote on Wednesday by the European Parliament, which is holding a plenary session in Strasbourg. 

The European Parliament announced earlier that in negotiations with EU countries it had achieved a funding increase of EUR 230.7 million compared to the initial draft budget presented by the European Commission.

The EP's position is that the new EU budget should focus more on key programmes and policies aimed at improving people's lives, boosting competitiveness and tackling important challenges. These include climate change, the need to improve healthcare, illegal migration and the defence of EU countries. 

On Tuesday, MEPs held a debate on the parameters of the draft budget.

"We remained united. With its almost EUR 200 billion, the 2025 budget we agreed with the Council (of the EU) is 6% higher than this year's budget. This means that it has been increased by EUR 10 billion,” said chief rapporteur for the EU budget for 2025, Romanian MEP Victor Negrescu, who is also Vice-President of the European Parliament.

After the debate, Victor Negrescu gave a briefing to journalists covering the EP plenary session in Strasbourg.

Asked by BTA whether he assesses the EU budget for the coming year as sufficient to finance the implementation of the Recovery and Sustainability Mechanism given that Bulgaria has received only one payment under its Recovery and Sustainability Plan, Negrescu replied that this is related to two problems.

The first problem concerns the fact that "we have to make sure that the European Union will have the money to pay" the borrowing costs on the loans it has taken to finance the mechanism, Victor Negrescu noted.

"The second problem is related to the implementation of the mechanism itself", the MEP stressed, who is the EP rapporteur for its implementation.

"Our goal is to make sure that we have the necessary resources to finance the Recovery and Sustainability Mechanism," Negrescu explained.

He pointed out that many EU countries have already submitted their requests for a fourth or fifth payment related to the implementation of their recovery and resilience plans.

The Vice-President of the European Parliament said that the cost of servicing the loans taken out to finance the mechanism was increasing.

"The European Union budget for the coming year needs more than EUR 2.6 billion more than originally foreseen, if I remember correctly," Negrescu said.

By 2027, the unforeseen additional cost of servicing the loans committed to finance the Recovery and Sustainability Mechanism could increase by between EUR 4 billion and EUR 10 billion, according to various estimates by the European Commission, he said.

"Because of this, it was important for us to reach an agreement on the mechanism itself," Negrescu said, adding that negotiations on this issue are not yet over.