MEP Negrescu: European citizens and Romania lose because of European Council's decision

PSD (Social Democratic Party) MEP Victor Negrescu on Tuesday stated that compared with the initial proposal the European citizens and Romania lose because of the decision made by the European Council regarding the budget, by which the amounts for rural development, research, health or digitalization were being in fact cut down, and, in his opinion, our country was basically "missing from the negotiations."

"Compared with the initial proposal of the European Commission and the European Parliament, the European citizens and Romania lost in fact because of the decision made today by the European Council regarding the European budget. The European leaders decided on a budget that cuts down significantly the initial amounts proposed for rural development, research, healthcare or digitalization, which means less money, especially in grants, for Romania, compared with the initial formula. The recovery plan, ambitious in its making, has fewer grants today than the proposal adopted by the European Parliament. Basically, Romania was completely missing from these negotiations, it did not have a clear agenda and got less than the mathematic formulas or how much we needed, considering our country's needs, the development gaps and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis," Negrescu wrote on his Facebook page.

He added that the 79.9 billion euros announced by the President also include loans not only grants and that, both in terms of amounts and the conditionalities imposed to the beneficiary countries, Romania gets less than obtained initially, in objective terms, through the formulas applied by the European institutions.

"What Romania was supposed to receive, and the negotiation team did not obtain that, was an amount of minimum 50 billions euros in grants from the future European budget (without the recovery plan), and from the 33 billion meant for the recovery plan, minimum 25 billion were supposed to be grants for the recovery plan (now we have several loans), this increase in the amount being calculated according to the new wave of infections with COVID in Romania, the N+3 rule applied to the recovery plan, less conditionalities to use the money easier and in the areas of interest, with no other Member State or unclear mechanism to exist in the allocation/blocking of the European money so that we will be sure to not face the Schengen situation all over again, the allocation of national envelopes for the programmes managed by the European Commission, a substantial European budget for healthcare to help Romania, a higher budget for rural development, given the fact that this was a successful programme in Romania and the need is still high, without own resources to cost Romania too much," explained the PSD MEP.