The European Parliament this week approved the EU’s budget for next year. It is 6% higher than this year’s budget and includes additional funds for more effective support in health care, humanitarian aid, border management, and climate change. “A great challenge today that does not have its funding in the budget is to assist the European arms market. We must find a European source of funding for the so-called military Schengen zone,” assessed MEP Andrzej Halicki.
The EU budget for 2025 amounts to 199.4 billion euros in commitments and 155.2 billion euros in payments. The next year’s budget is 10 billion euros higher than last year’s budget (an increase of approximately 6%).
“This is indeed a higher budget than the previous one. It is being prepared within the framework of multiannual financial frameworks so it is not a flexible budget, we must work within certain limits,” says Andrzej Halicki, MEP from the Civic Platform, to the Newseria Biznes.
This is the first annual budget after the review of the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework in February 2024. The most funds – almost 78 billion euros in commitments and 44 billion in payments – will go towards cohesion policy and strengthening EU resilience. Climatic policy came second (56.7 billion euros in commitments and 52 billion in payments).
Under the next year’s budget, 3 billion euros will go towards supporting regions affected by natural disasters. As early as 2024, devastating floods hit Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. The European Commission estimates that over the past 30 years, floods have affected 5.5 million people in the EU, caused the death of 3 thousand people, and over 170 billion euros in economic losses. The budget also includes approximately 800 million euros for unforeseen needs, which will allow for a quick response.
“These are catastrophes, such as fires or floods, resulting from climate change, so aid to the victims of these calamities is essential and the reactions must be swift,” argues Andrzej Halicki.
“Today’s financial perspective, or the multiannual plan of EU finances, was born when we did not foresee additional expenditures, for example, that there would be a war in Ukraine and floods all over Europe, but also in our part of Europe, mainly in Lower Silesia. For this reason, a valuable feature of the new budget we agreed on for 2025 is an advance of 1.5 billion for flood victims and affected areas in our country. For this reason, we needed slightly more money in the budget,” says Janusz Lewandowski, MEP from the Civic Platform.
More funds than in last year’s budget will go to issues related to migration and border management (4.8 billion euros in commitments and 3.2 billion in payments).
The strengthening of EU security and defense will receive 2.6 billion euros in commitments and 2.1 billion euros in payments from the budget.
MEPs negotiated an additional 230.7 million euros for key programs beyond the Commission’s initial draft, including for research, climate action, humanitarian aid, and border management.
MEPs also secured funding for the repayment costs of the European Recovery Instrument, which are almost twice as high as originally projected for the year 2025, meanwhile preserving essential program funding, such as Erasmus+ or scientific research.
According to the European Commission, considering the 27 countries and 450 million people, the EU’s annual budget is relatively small. In the years 2021-2027, it averages between 160 and 180 billion euros annually, comparable to Denmark’s national budget supporting a population of 5.6 million, and about 30% smaller than Poland’s, with a population of 38 million. More and more are talking about the need to increase it.
