MEPs of the Committee on Budgets of the European Parliament have settled on strong guidelines for the EU budget for 2024, which were adopted this week with 28 votes in favour.

As the S&D shadow rapporteur, MEP Victor Negrescu succeeded in integrating important priorities in the final version of the report, with a focus on a stronger economy, energy independence, health, agriculture,  education and youth and tackling geopolitical challenges between priorities.

”We underlined the importance of more ambitious funding to SMEs, throughout all relevant programmes, to help them deal with the high energy costs and inflation. We have highlighted the importance of ensuring a strong focus on implementation of the Connecting Europe Facility programme, which could lead to better funding of projects focused on  interconnections of energy and infrastructure, as well as  more ambitious wording on Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps in order to support learning mobility opportunities. In particular with regards to Erasmus+ we have a commitment to ensuring the EU budget mitigates the impact of rising participation costs, including inflation, in order to guarantee the programme is accessible to all, rather than only to those who can afford to participate”, explained MEP Victor Negrescu.

He obtained, among others, ”maintaining the support of the European legislature for cohesion policy, but also mentioning the need to increase the resources available at European level with the review of the EU’s long-term budget, halfway through the implementation period”.

”The European Union cannot just stand by and watch the challenges citizens face. We need swift and concrete responses in preparing a review of the EU’s long-term budget, which will provide additional financial resources to ensure a consistent response to the needs of Europeans”, stressed MEP Victor Negrescu.

Moreover, he and his S&D colleagues insisted on focusing on additional support for front line Member States in the context of the war in Ukraine and the need to reinforce the EU’s Defence Technological and Industrial Base through programmes meant to reinforce their production capacities and interoperability.

The vote in plenary is scheduled during the 17-20 April session. The Commission is expected to present its proposal for the 2024 budget in June 2023. The European Parliament is directly involved in the process of negotiating the European budget, with the legal procedure providing the adoption of general guidelines at the beginning of the year, while the discussion on the amounts to be allocated to European programmes is due to take place in the second part of the year, when the European legislature will enter into inter-institutional negotiations with the European Commission and the Council.