EU budget far from the final hurdle

The European Parliament and the Austrian presidency will sit down at the negotiating table this week to discuss the budget proposals agreed on during the European summit last December.

There is tough negotiating road ahead as the parliament isn't fond of the budget accepted by the member states' leaders.

"The European Parliament acknowledges the agreement the state leaders reached in December, but it rejects the terms of the agreement," the Chairman of the Committee on Budgets of the European Parliament, Janusz Lewandowski, said. "There is no budget for 2007-2013, only the parliament and the governments' proposals," he explained.

Lewandowski says the difference between the parliament's proposal and the budget agreement reached at the end of the British presidency is over EUR 100 (zł.380) billion. But this is not what worries him most.

"In the financial plan agreed on in Brussels we can see an attempt to replace the traditional EU policies with new ones," he said, claiming that regional help and cohesion funds are being substituted  with new budget positions, such as expenditure on R&D.

"Regional policy helps create equal chances in the EU, while the R&D expenditure will not necessarily do so," Lewandowski argues.

If the two factions don't reach an agreement, the EU will have to make do with annual budgets. "We have a good basis for this case with the 2006 budget - a much better one than with the long-term budget," he said.

However, he admitted that a system of annual budgets would have major drawbacks: "Financially, annual budgets will be better for Poland, but they mean a lot of uncertainty for those who want to build long-term programs, especially the regional policy which Poland needs most."