BRUSSELS ― When Ursula von der Leyen returned for a second term as European Commission president late last year, her advisers identified reforming the EU’s next long-term budget as one of her toughest missions.
Full of hidden landmines, competing demands and squabbles from Lisbon to Latvia, it was clear it wouldn’t take much for it to blow up in her face. Most governments don’t want to give the EU a penny more than they already do ― but the European Parliament demands the opposite. The Ukraine conflict has sparked a rapid need for defense investment ― yet the EU takes cash away from farmers at its peril.
While those kinds of tension aren’t new, the bloc is more polarized than ever, and despite a return to power that looked more like a coronation than an election, von der Leyen’s political support is fragile and looking increasingly frayed.
The muddled and opaque way the budget for the seven-year period from 2028 onward was announced on Wednesday didn’t help.
Bickering over figures
Planning had started early.
Anticipating a brutal negotiation, von der Leyen and her chief of staff, Bjoern Seibert, kicked off talks with member countries as far back as 18 months ago, before she even knew she’d have a second term in power, according to an EU official. The idea was to gather input, avoid a messy fight down the line, and be able to present a budget that had considerable buy-in.
Merely on the evidence of the past 48 hours or so, that strategy appears shaky.
At midday on Wednesday ― the time Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin had been scheduled to present the plan to the European Parliament ― officials were still bickering over the final figures. They had burned the midnight oil on Tuesday night, with top officials from the teams of the 27 commissioners locked in talks in the Berlaymont (the Commission’s HQ in Brussels) until 2 a.m. on Wednesday, resuming at 8 a.m.
Then the commissioners themselves, whose weekly meeting tends to be a rubber-stamping exercise, met at Wednesday lunchtime and engaged in a political dogfight that lasted almost until Serafin finally appeared for the launch.
To the annoyance of MEPs and parliamentary officials, Serafin arrived four hours late. The presentation was riddled with confusion about what the numbers exactly meant and how they’d be calculated, and lawmakers were outraged for not having received the figures beforehand.
“We hope you brought some document with you as well, as this distinguished house has not been informed,” lawmaker Siegfried Mureșan sniped at Serafin, who hails from the same center-right group.
In fact, even von der Leyen’s team of commissioners weren’t aware of the overall figures until a few hours earlier.
Explaining the murky process, one official close to a commissioner said: “She told us how much she would cut from our program but we didn’t know how much she would cut from those of our peers.”
For everyone apart from the small close-knit group that the president confides in, it made working out the exact overall policy incredibly difficult to comprehend.
Ramshackle alliance
In recent months, criticism of von der Leyen and her centralized way of decision-making has increased but, for the first time, simmering internal opposition burst to the surface. Commissioners, mainly those from different political colors, forced her to back down.
Von der Leyen’s big idea had been to merge a plethora of different pots of the budget into plans for each country that would only pay out when governments carry out reforms. In her view, this system would have encouraged recalcitrant countries to step up their game while increasing Brussels’ leverage over capitals.
But as the weeks have gone by, a ramshackle alliance of farmers, regions and lawmakers coalesced to push back against her big vision. Inside the Commission, an unlikely union between a Romanian Socialist, an Italian right-winger and a Luxembourgish moderate whose brother is a farmer demanded major concessions.
“They all managed to save face,” said a Commission official close to the discussion. Another said they “fought hard and did all they could to protect their policies.”
Faced with threats of major cuts to the EU’s giant farming budget, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen managed to safeguard €300 billion that goes directly in the pockets of farmers.
For the Common Agricultural Policy, “it’s not a revolution but an evolution,” Hansen told reporters, in an effort to reassure angry farmers who protested on Brussels streets on Wednesday.
Another open front for von der Leyen was Social Rights Commissioner Roxana Mînzatu, who fought a rearguard battle to preserve the European Social Fund which caters for the training of the unemployed and other vulnerable groups. While she failed to secure an amount for the ESF, she obtained a commitment that 14 percent of the overall budget must account for social spending.
Meanwhile, Cohesion and Reforms Commissioner Raffaele Fitto pushed back against the plan to expand the power of national governments to the detriment of regions. He feared that such a project would have eroded his power within the Commission and undermined the EU’s regional policy, which he oversees.
This was one of the thorniest issues during the two days of back-to-back meetings between heads of cabinets of commissioners. In Fitto’s team’s meetings with Seibert “it was all about this,” an official said. He secured a commitment to ringfence €218 billion of funding directly for less-developed regions.
Von der Leyen has had a tricky start to her second term as Commission president. She’s faced a European Parliament no-confidence vote and warned it was her “absolute last chance.” She’s been confronted with accusations that she’s teamed up with far-right lawmakers to push through legislation, ignoring the centrist groups who helped her secure a second term. And she lost a court ruling over her “Pfizergate” exchange of text messages with a Covid-19 vaccine maker.
The next two years of negotiations over the budget were never going to be easy. The way it has started has made a tough job even tougher.
Nicholas Vinocur contributed reporting.
The muddled €1.8 trillion EU budget launch that exposes von der Leyen’s weaknesses
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