Regions were lied to and abandoned in the proposal for the next long-term EU budget, local leaders told the European Commission during a heated meeting on Tuesday.
The Commission’s plan to merge funding for regional development and agriculture in the €2 trillion budget, known as national plans, is unpopular with regional authorities, who argue that they have been sidelined in favour of Brussels and national capitals.
“The EU is on the verge of making a mistake of historical proportions,” said Vasco Alves Cordeiro, budget chair of the Committee of Regions (CoR), the assembly of sub-national European, authorities, during a session with regional leaders, the Commission, and the Council.
“We are being abandoned,” added Wojciech Saługa, Marshal of the Silesia region in Poland.
Cordeiro said the Commission not only excluded regions from the discussions but also misled them after the merger idea was first leaked last October.
“What was told to us was that it is not true, that it was only an exercise,” he said. “We were lied to.”
But the head of unit for the Commission’s DG BUDG, Franck Conrad, dismissed the criticism. Brussels is proposing “the exact same rules for the managing authorities… the roles that they have today are being translated in the future without changing,” he said.
“You confused me… because you gave us the idea that managing authorities, regions have a big say,” said Pascal Smet, representing the Brussels region. That “doesn’t correspond to the [proposed] regulation.”
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The debate comes as the European Parliament is also threatening to reject national plans over similar concerns over their centralised structure.
Meanwhile, Danish diplomat Peter Hedegaard-Degn, who leads EU countries’ technical work on the national plans file, stressed that “there are no conclusions on this in the council yet,” adding that no one is working to exclude regions in the Council discussions.
CORRECTION: This article was amend to correct that Cordeiro is not president of Committee of regions, but chaired this session
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