European Council president António Costa said that new, EU-wide taxes could shield German taxpayers from sending more money to Brussels. With less than four months to go until an informal deadline to reach a deal on the EU’s 2028-2034 budget, Costa signaled that new levies would reduce national contributions to the EU’s coffers. This is a key aim for Germany, which finances a quarter of the cash pot.
We need to create new own resources in order to protect the national budgets,” Costa said in a joint press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin. Costa’s visit came only three days after the far-right Alternative for Germany secured a historic landslide victory in the regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt. The Euroskeptics’ success risks hardening Merz’s stance in the budget negotiations, according to several EU diplomats.
Speaking alongside Costa, the German Chancellor reiterated calls to cut “several hundreds of billions” from the Commission’s near-€2 trillion proposal. He described the budget increase as “simply prohibitive because at the end it is the European taxpayer who has to foot the bill.” Costa countered that EU-wide taxes, known as own resources, are needed to finance common European policy areas such as defense and competitiveness that cannot be addressed by individual governments. The Portuguese leader has previously signaled that he intends to narrow down several potential taxes that are acceptable to EU governments during a leaders’ summit on Oct. 15.
New own resources were expected to be €66 billion per year according to the Commission’s proposal from last July. But after over one year of negotiations, EU governments have only agreed to proposed levies on foreign polluters, known as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and on uncollected electronic waste, which are expected to jointly raise around €20 billion per year.
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