Lewandowski puts forward €142bn budget for 2015

The Commission says more money should go to new programmes for jobs and growth.

The European Commission proposed today (11 June) an EU budget for 2015 that would be slightly increased over this year’s budget. The Commission said the money should be more targeted toward policies aimed at stimulating growth than is currently the case.

The college of European commissioners adopted the proposal without debate. It had been approved last Friday (6 June) by the heads of the private offices of the European commissioners.

It sets at €145.6 billion the spending pledges (or ‘commitments’) the Union can make next year and at €142.1bn the amount of money that the Commission can use to pay for actual expenditure. The commitments figure is an increase of 2.1% on the 2014 budget while the payments figure is up 1.3%. The share of the annual budget devoted to cover previous commitments has been halved, from around 80% in the 2014 budget to around 40% in the 2015 budget proposal, making more money available for new programmes, notably on growth and jobs.

The proposal comes hard on the heels of a request for a €4.7bn in extra payment appropriations for the current annual budget that has irritated with the member states. Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and budget, told the European Parliament’s budgets committee yesterday that it would have been “dishonest” to delay the top-up request until later this year, as some member states had demanded. He said that the Commission had already spent more than half of the expenditure foreseen in the current annual budget.

National budgets experts at the Council of Ministers are scheduled to discuss the proposal for the annual budget and for the increase in current appropriations today (12 June). The Parliament’s budgets committee had reconvened for a special session for Lewandowski’s presentation, the only committee to meet since Parliament suspended work ahead of last month’s elections.

The committee will hold its constituent session in its new composition on 7 July, when it will elect a chair and the rapporteur on the 2015 budget. Eider Gardiazábal Rubial, a centre-left Spaniard, has been put forward by her group as the nominee for rapporteur on the 2015 budget. The first three-way talks on the proposal are scheduled for 10 July.

Alain Lamassoure, the centre-right chair of the budgets committee, is not expected to remain in post. The centre-right Lewandowski might be a candidate if he does take up the seat in the European Parliament to which he was elected, although the budgets committee has clearly been unimpressed by his performance overall. Another possible candidate is Jean Arthuis, a new MEP from the French liberals who is currently chair of the French senate’s finance committee and is a former finance minister.

The chances of Reimer Böge, a veteran centre-right German MEP who chaired the committee in 2007-09, could be lowered if, as expected, another centre-right German, Elmar Brok, continues to chair the foreign-affairs committee.

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