What the European Council’s MFF / Recovery deal tells us about the EU’s global ambition
- After four days of intense negotiations, EU leaders have finally reached an agreement on the EU´s long-term EU budget and post-Covid recovery fund. The final compromise leaves mixed feelings. It truly constitutes a historically ambitious package which almost doubles EU spending for 2021-2024 with money raised on the financial markets. Internal solidarity and economic recovery are key pre-conditions for wielding power externally and being resilient to external influence. The contrast between the initial lack of intra-European solidarity and China’s so-called “mask diplomacy” underlined by targeted disinformation illustrates this point. At the same time, we saw a traditional pattern in the European Council’s budgetary negotiations: the compromise has been reached by largely preserving spending pre-allocated to Member States – e.g. agriculture and cohesion spending, the new facility providing support to national recovery and resilience plans - and by drastically cutting key EU programmes financing EU-level public goods and thus delivering added value for all – in areas such as research and innovation, mobility, development aid or internal and external security.