German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for a “fundamental modernization” of the European Union’s budget during an address on Thursday at a ceremony to award this year’s Charlemagne Prize to Italian statesman Mario Draghi.<\/p>\n
Merz said this was needed to establish the EU as an independent power in a world of change. The EU’s medium-term financial planning should be oriented more towards military and economic strength, he said.<\/p>\n
“Slimmed-down structure, investment in competitiveness and defence, a focus on European resources for European politics. All of this is needed, because resources are limited,” Merz said.<\/p>\n
But he also ruled out taking on new debt. “German cannot take this path, on constitutional grounds,” he said.<\/p>\n
The EU budget is set for seven years at a time, with talks ongoing on the 2028-34 budget. The European Commission has put forward a budget of \u20ac1.76 trillion euros ($2.06 trillion), adjusted for inflation. Germany contributes the largest share.<\/p>\n
Merz noted that more than two thirds of the money went to “redistribution and subsidies,” while his aim was to boost European sovereignty in a world in which great power politics as pursued by the United States, China and Russia, played a decisive role.<\/p>\n
“We have to define our own interests in a self-confident way. And we must be prepared to invest something to maintain these interests,” he said.<\/p>\n
Europe had woken up and understood that it could maintain itself in this world only through economic strength and its security policies, he said.<\/p>\n
“Europe has set itself the talk of becoming a power, a power that can stand up to the storms of the new era,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for a “fundamental modernization” of the European Union’s budget during an address on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2385],"tags":[26614,1858,256,5091,26764,26763,40,2828,15824,6322,666],"class_list":{"0":"post-41893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-european-commission","8":"tag-charlemagne-prize","9":"tag-european-central-bank","10":"tag-european-commission","11":"tag-european-politics","12":"tag-european-power","13":"tag-european-resources","14":"tag-european-union","15":"tag-friedrich-merz","16":"tag-german-chancellor","17":"tag-mario-draghi","18":"tag-the-european-commission"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}