Budget 2023: “We want to tackle energy crisis, war and economy”
The EU’s budget for 2023 should aim to deal with the many crises facing Europe, says lead MEP Nicolae Ştefănuță.
The European Parliament approved the EU’s budget for 2023 on 23 November 2022. This interview with Nicolae Ştefănuță, (Renew Europe, Romania), who wrote the report on Parliament's priorities for the budget, took place ahead of the negotiations with the Council.
You say in your budget report that the EU faces an extraordinarily complex set of challenges and the budget should contribute to tackle them. Which challenges are you referring to?
The EU’s long-term budget, which puts a limit on the annual budget, was prepared in 2018. That was before we had five consecutive crises and challenges: the pandemic, the energy crisis, inflation, the war in Ukraine and the accession of Ukraine and Moldova who became candidate countries. This means we are going to war with bow and arrow, but we are in a digital age. We are going to war with something that is not adapted to the current war that we are facing.
The main message is that we need to revise the EU’s long-term budget to make it better for the times we live in so that we have more space for manoeuvre and more money to act. If we don’t react, EU citizens will question why the EU isn’t doing something. If we get an additional crisis, and we don’t have any money left, what will the citizens say? In Italy, we see for example that the initial hesitation to the pandemic is costing us political votes today.
These are extraordinary times. The budget we received on the table [the European Commission’s draft proposal] was ordinary. We tried to change it from ordinary to extraordinary.
Some of the crises that you mention are very much market-driven. How can the EU’s budget tackle those kinds of crises?
That is a good question. Not all issues can be solved by throwing more money at them. You mention the market-driven ones, but we also have the war-driven one. Those are things that we don’t control. What we can do is to have a joint effort.
In this budget, we tackle exactly the challenges of the energy crisis, the war and the economy. Those are our three big priorities, but at the same time we need to adopt legislation and take other steps. For the energy crisis we need RepowerEU, but also other measures. Money doesn’t solve everything, but it can help a lot in reducing the pain.
We in the Parliament basically took every single point on energy in the Commission’s draft budget proposal and increased it; for instance regarding innovation, new energy sources and renewable energy and for SMEs dealing with the cost of energy. We have proposed a package that is €533 million above the draft budget. That’s our energy response this year.
Some might be a bit worried that one of the biggest challenges of our generation - climate change - might take a step back because there are so many other issues now that need to be resolved. What's in your budget proposal for the climate?
We propose an increase for the Life programme. We tackle the climate change issue together with the other issues. I think it’s important to not stop the Green Deal. I, for one, do not agree with the people who say that the Green Deal put us in the energy crisis. On the contrary. If we had had the Green Deal already, we would perhaps not have been in this situation. We would have had more renewables and less dependence on Russian oil and external sources.
How does your budget proposal support Ukraine?
We have created a package worth €853 million. We have increased our defence capabilities, our military mobility and joint procurement of weapons. There’s Erasmus for Ukrainian students. There are increases to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme on research as we have Ukrainian researchers in the EU. There are packages on humanitarian aid because the refugees and the member states, who host refugees, need help.
A country like Moldova also needs help. It’s a candidate country, but doesn’t really receive much support from us at the moment because they don’t yet receive pre-accession money. They have seen a seven-fold rise in energy prices, so they are begging for help this winter. We should support the,m because it’s important that we keep a pro-European government in Moldova.
