Additional funding for military mobility projects decided in June

The European Council will take a decision in June on the financing of military mobility programmes for the current budgetary framework and, following the decision, the European Parliament will approve either an adjustment to the current budget or the establishment of a fund to finance the respective projects, Siegfried Mureşan, EP co-rapporteur for the 2028-2034 multiannual financial framework, said on Friday at a press conference in Bucharest.

Siegfried Mureşan stated: "The resources allocated from the European Union budget for the period 2021-2027 for security and defence do not correspond to current needs, they do not cover them, and therefore at the informal meeting of the European Council that took place earlier this month, discussions were started, in the presence of the President of the European Commission, on the possibility of generating additional resources to be used before the next budgetary financial year enters into force. In the next seven years, defense will be the priority of the European Union budget, but let's be honest: we will adopt the future multiannual financial framework in 2026, it will enter into force in 2028, and from the EU budget that I will negotiate, there will be money for defense and military mobility only in 2028. Too late. Something must be done by then because there are no more funds for such a thing in the current budget, because we did not foresee that a war would start in Ukraine. As such, the topic of financing defense and military mobility will be the main topic of the June meeting of the European Council, when the allocation of additional resources would be decided. These amounts can be introduced into the European Union budget or they can be allocated by the European Investment Bank or we can create an additional fund as we did the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism immediately after the pandemic. There is no decision yet, there have been no concrete discussions, but there is an agreement among all member states, including those that are net contributors, that more needs to be done in the field of security and defense before 2028. I believe that in the summer of this year we will have the opportunity to allocate additional resources in the field of defense, starting this year, and I expect the European Commission to come up with some proposals from a technical point of view".

We recall that, in the middle of last week, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published a devastating report on military mobility at European level, in which it states that this area was underfunded in the period 2021-2027, that the total allocation of 1.7 billion euros does not reflect the needs on the ground and that preference was given to financing projects in the area of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania towards Ukraine, neglecting the southern mobility route on the Greece-Bulgaria-Romania-Ukraine relationship.

Read In case of conflict, we wait in vain for 100.000 soldiers from the West

• Subsidies for farmers in our country will reach the European average

Regarding the future multiannual financial framework (MFF) 2028-2034, Siegfried Mureşan stated that the Common Agricultural Policy foresees a gradual increase in subsidies for Romanian farmers, so that the value of these subsidies reaches the European average. According to the European Parliament co-rapporteur for the MFF 2028-2034, the total budget of the European Union during that period will exceed 1000 billion euros and will have substantial allocations for cohesion policy - which has become, in Mr. Mureşan's opinion, the most important investment policy at European level -, for the common agricultural policy, but also for security and defense, the latter being an absolute priority of the community bloc. Cohesion policy will also finance dual-use infrastructure projects - civil and military, and the common agricultural policy will support European farmers to maintain high quality standards of agri-food products and increase production.

"Both quality and quantity are important. I understand that Donald Trump, the US president, complains that we don't buy more food from his country. We don't because of quality standards. American agri-food products are far below the quality standards of European products," said Siegfried Mureşan.

In order to facilitate access to these funds by farmers, non-governmental organizations and SMEs, Siegfried Mureşan proposed, in the report he drafted and which would be voted on in May by the European Parliament and then submitted to the European Commission, reducing bureaucracy, simplifying documentation for all categories of European funds, evaluating from the point of view of final beneficiaries, standardizing existing programs, but also making the EU budget more flexible. On this last aspect, Mr. Mureşan stated that he would like to see larger funds set aside in the future European multiannual financial framework 2028-2034 to allow the European Union to react quickly to unforeseen or crisis situations such as those generated by the Covid 19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy price crisis, and the floods and fires of 2024 caused by climate change.