EP will seek a 10 percent higher MFF
BRUSSELS – The European Parliament intends to request a 10 percent increase in the seven-year budget for the period 2028–2034 compared to the proposal of the European Commission.
“We propose that the amount the Commission put forward in July be used only for budgetary programmes, and that the debt taken on for Next Generation EU be repaid from an off-budget fund. This means an increase of the MFF by around 10 percent,” said the rapporteur for the MFF, Siegfried Muresan.
The rapporteurs for the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), Romanian MEP Siegfried Muresan (EPP) and Carla Tavares (S&D/Portugal), presented the draft report to the budget committee on Thursday. Members of the budget committee can submit amendments to this report until the end of January, and other committees can give their opinions until 10 March. The report is expected to be adopted at committee level in April and at the plenary session in May next year. This report will serve as a mandate for the European Parliament’s negotiators for talks with the Council on the next MFF.
The European Commission proposed in mid-July a seven-year budget for the period from 2028 to 2034 in the amount of two trillion euros. This amount includes funds for repaying the loans the Union took out for recovery from the pandemic. Without the funds for debt repayment, the budget amounts to 1.816 trillion euros. Debt repayment begins in 2028 and the costs of interest and principal are estimated at 25 to 30 billion annually.
Muresan and Tavares now propose that the same amount of two trillion remain, and that debt repayment be financed outside the budget. In practice, this would mean an increase in funds for budgetary programmes by just under 200 billion euros.
Muresan says they are aware of the budgetary constraints in the member states and that it is therefore not possible to ask for higher national contributions to the European budget. They therefore propose increasing the EU’s own budgetary revenues, which means new taxes that would go directly into the European budget and would bring in an additional roughly 60 billion euros annually.
“We are not ready to accept a budget without an increase in own resources,” said Muresan.
According to the European Commission’s MFF proposal, 865 billion euros is earmarked for cohesion and agriculture, slightly less than half of the MFF. In previous multiannual budgets, more than two-thirds of the budget went to cohesion, that is, to the development of poorer regions and to agriculture.
According to the Commission’s proposal, funds for agriculture are pooled in national and regional partnership plans through which each member state will receive its financial envelope, as was the case with the Recovery and Resilience Facility funds.
In previous multiannual budgets, more than two-thirds of the budget went to cohesion, that is, to the development of poorer regions and to agriculture. (11 December 2025)
