The president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola (European People’s Party, PPE), published on September 11 in MO12345lemonde in which she called to “modernize” the budget of the European Union (EU), just before the Speech by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on the state of the European Union of September 14. She is doubly reason, on the observation and at the moment. But on the solutions, what she offers is not up to par. Because it is not simply by betting on more “flexibility” of the budget that the EU will be able to meet the challenges of times coming.
The problem of the European budget is that its volume is insufficient, that its orientations and its execution are not ambitious enough in ecological and social matters, and that the EU is not mistress of the revenues which feed this budget.
Member of the Parliamentary Budget Commission since my election to the European Parliament in 2019, I was struck by the inadequacy between the European budget and the economic weight of the EU. The European Union is a budgetary dwarf. The EU budget painfully represents 1 % of the wealth produced in the Union. By way of comparison, certainly imperfect, the federal budget of the United States represents 25 % of the American gross domestic product (GDP).
The other handicap of our budget is therefore that the EU is not mistress of its revenues. Only 25 % of the European budget is funded by European tax revenues, called “own resources”, the remaining 75 % come from states.
If you add to this that 40 % of our current budget is intended to finance an industrial and chemical design of agriculture, which not only penalizes farmers and farmers, but deeply degrades the environment, we measure how much The European budget is now unfit to meet the needs that the ecological transformation of our economic and social model requires.
Moreover, the European Court of Auditors recently revealed that the green expenses planned for the previous multi-year financial framework 2014-2020 had been amputated in fact of more than 72 billion euros because, mainly, of expenses in the agricultural field which has proven to be falsely ecological.
Each and everyone measures it, we are in a decisive moment. This situation is not only to respond to cyclical and passenger problems, but a systemic crisis of the current model known as “development”. The original promise of “peace and prosperity” which guided European construction, already threatened by a liberal and technocratic drift, is now also so by the ecological crisis and its social, economic, health, geopolitical and democratic consequences.
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