European United Left - Nordic Green Left : Long term budget vote - two years of talks yield cuts, cuts, cuts…

19/11/2013

Speaking ahead of today's European Parliament vote on the final result of talks between Parliament's negotiating team and Council on the EU's long-term budget for 2014-2020, GUE/NGL MEP Jürgen Klute said the Group simply cannot support the outcome of these negotiations, as set out in the draft Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF) regulation.

"We want a budget that will cover expected expenditure. In spite of new competences and the accession of Croatia to the EU, spending will be reduced over the next seven years," Klute said. "Council representatives claim that citizens are going to benefit from this - but how? All we've got is swingeing cuts, especially in the social sector. Important funds like the structural and cohesion funds face the deepest cuts, yet they are the most necessary funds. With this austerity budget, the EU will never be able to combat the high unemployment and poverty in the South - in fact, regional disparities will increase even further! We need growth, not endless austerity."

Portuguese GUE/NGL MEP João Ferreira said the approval of this MFF was "the conclusion of a long-running farce".

"While the uneven nature of integration and asymmetric divergence between countries and regions is deepening, the real face of the EU and the fraud of European solidarity are being revealed. For the first time in history, the budget has been reduced in nominal terms. If it was small before, it has now been now crushed, despite the context of further enlargement."

"The biggest beneficiaries of the single market and common policies have now simply gone ahead and imposed the cuts they wanted. Scandalous inequalities in the distribution of CAP funds persist, and now we have macroeconomic conditionality that will impose permanent blackmail on states in difficulty. With this deal the mask of European social democracy has fallen to the ground. The agreement reached in the Council is bad; to approve it here is nothing short of shameful!"

 GUE/NGL Press:
David Lundy +32 470 85 05 09
Gay Kavanagh +32 473 84 23 20
Emily Macintosh +32 470 85 05 08