The structure of the European Union’s next multi-annual financial framework (MFF) for 2014-20 will top the agenda of a meeting of Europe ministers next week. The General Affairs Council in Luxembourg on Tuesday (26 June) will be the last ministerial meeting to be chaired by Denmark before it hands over the presidency of the Council to Cyprus. 

Nicolai Wammen, Denmark’s minister for European affairs, will seek agreement on a Danish proposal to include large-scale projects in the MFF that the European Commission wanted to keep separate: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES).

The Commission’s MFF proposal, adopted last June, set a ceiling of €1,025 billion for total EU expenditure in 2014-20, but placed ITER (an experimental nuclear fusion project with a proposed budget of €2.7bn) and GMES (a satellite communications project with €5.8bn) outside the framework.

The Commission argued that such projects inevitably produce large cost overruns that cannot be met under the EU’s budget. But many member states want to include these projects in the MFF so that cost overruns will be met by cuts in other policy areas, rather than through contributions from national budgets.

The member states also want to close down the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund, for which the Commission had sought €3bn for 2014-20. Denmark’s MFF document, known as a ‘negotiating box’, contains all main elements of revenue and expenditure and presents options for the main issues, but without any actual figures. It is supposed to reflect the state of the discussions, which take place primarily at expert level in the Council’s budget working group, with the number of options dwindling as agreement is reached on new parts of the proposal.

Since the negotiations have not yet touched on actual figures, the main disagreements are of a conceptual nature. The main battle lines over expenditure have already emerged, however – on the size and relative weight of agricultural and cohesion spending.

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