On July 16, the European Commission will present its proposal for the EU budget in the next seven-year financial perspective. The draft is expected to include fewer programs, a larger share of unallocated funds, and mechanisms and reserves that enable faster and more flexible responses to changing needs. It will also allocate more resources to strengthening security. In May, the European Parliament rejected the Commission’s proposal to structure post-2027 budgets similarly to the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
“The Union used to be extremely pacifist, but the war has shown that our strategic sovereignty, amid uncertainty about American guarantees, requires a military dimension, which is explicitly prohibited in the budget but can be financed outside it. This is the task of Piotr Serafin, who is figuring out how to do this without violating treaty rules,” said Janusz Lewandowski, MEP from the Civic Platform (PO), in an interview with Newseria. “This is the first long-term budget during wartime, and it must also include defense spending — but not at the expense of cohesion or agricultural policy.”
Poland has been a member of the EU for 21 years. According to calculations by the Ministry of Finance, the net cumulative balance of Poland’s EU membership over two decades amounts to €161.6 billion, with nearly two-thirds (65%) of funding allocated under cohesion policy, mainly improving transport, energy, and social infrastructure. Just over 30% of funds were allocated through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The current seven-year financial plan ends in 2027, with the next covering 2028–2034. If cohesion and agricultural policies continue to receive the bulk of funding, Poland will again be a net beneficiary of the EU budget during this period.
“The Parliament understands that traditional policies must be preserved because they built the EU’s visibility in all countries — cohesion policy and agricultural policy in two pillars: direct payments and rural development,” said Janusz Lewandowski. “We especially want to defend traditional cohesion and agricultural policies because we are their largest beneficiaries and likely will remain so until 2034. Besides that, the debt incurred during the pandemic, approximately €30 billion at its peak, must be repaid, requiring new sources to fund the EU budget.”
Previously, the European Commission proposed replacing sectoral programs with a single national plan for each member state, according to which the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) would serve as a spending model under shared management post-2027. The European Parliament rejected this proposal in May.
“Centralizing cohesion contradicts all existing findings. Regional cohesion policy gives a sense of ownership to regional authorities, making it visible in Poland’s regions and protecting cohesion policy from arbitrary decisions by central government. We implemented the programs I designed for 2014–2020 quite well, also during the current government’s time, because they were carried out regionally. We did not receive new money, but what was agreed and managed by regions was fully utilized,” explained Janusz Lewandowski, who served as EU Commissioner for Financial Programming and Budget from 2010 to 2015.
In April, the European Parliament’s Budget Committee adopted a report emphasizing that the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) must include funds significantly exceeding 1% of the EU’s Gross National Income (GNI). The committee recommends focusing on financing European public goods with clear added value compared to national expenditures. It also calls for increased investment in defense, with joint borrowing through EU bond issuance recommended. Additionally, it advocates maintaining a substantial internal flexibility reserve controlled by budgetary authorities and boosting crisis response capacity, including reallocating unused EU budget funds to crisis response.
Beyond the single national plan concept, the Budget Committee rejected the Commission’s planned umbrella Competitiveness Fund as inadequate and instead calls for a new instrument based on InvestEU and the Innovation Fund. MEPs urge the Council to adopt new own resources to enable sustainable repayment of Next Generation EU debt, as these real new resources are crucial given the Union’s increasing spending needs.
“At the same time, competitiveness is an imperative, but not through one giant fund that would overshadow other rules, because while it might increase flexibility, it reduces predictability of individual programs. Predictability of financing is as important as its amount,” assessed the Civic Platform MEP.
