Merz gathers net contributors in Berlin to cut the European budget

The negotiation on the European Union’s multiannual budget is entering the phase in which blocs are forming. German chancellor Friedrich Merz is gathering the heads of state and government of the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Denmark in Berlin on Thursday, August 27, to coordinate the position of net contributor countries on the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034. This is reported, based on the federal government’s communications, by Austrian public broadcaster ORF, by the Salzburger Nachrichten citing an APA agency dispatch, and by the financial portal onvista citing a dpa-AFX dispatch; the meeting also appears in the EFE agency agenda picked up by Infobae.

The criterion for the invitation

According to German government spokesman Stefan Kornelius, the countries invited to the meeting are those that share the goal of closing the negotiation on the Multiannual Financial Framework by 2026. This is a procedural definition — those who want to close quickly — which nonetheless coincides with the group of net contributors, that is, the states that pay more into the common budget than they receive.

On the scale of the cuts, the spokesman was explicit: the reduction should affect, in his words, “all sectors, that is, by several hundred billion euros” (transl. from German). The German government is asking to bring the Commission’s proposal down from around 2,000 to 1,600 billion euros for the seven-year period.

Item	Amount
Commission proposal for 2028-2034	around 2,000 billion euros
Share of the EU’s gross national income	1.26%
German government’s request	around 1,600 billion euros

The data on the Commission’s proposal are taken from the European Commission’s explanatory page on the 2028-2034 budget.

The French absence

French president Emmanuel Macron is not taking part in the meeting. According to Berlin, there is nonetheless close coordination with Paris on the file: the German explanation is that the absence does not signal a divergence. The chosen format — five heads of government, no European institution at the table — nonetheless remains that of a narrow group presenting itself at the negotiation with an agreed figure, while southern European countries are calling for more expansive accounts.

What has not been made public

The available sources do not publish a detailed agenda, do not indicate whether a joint statement is planned at the end, and do not specify which spending chapters the five governments intend to focus the reduction on: cohesion, agriculture, defense, and competitiveness are not broken down in any of the reports. Nor is it indicated whether the request for 1,600 billion is a German position already shared by the other four invitees or the starting point that Berlin is bringing to the table.

The difference between the two figures under discussion — 2,000 billion proposed by the Commission, 1,600 requested by Germany — amounts to around 400 billion euros over seven years, that is, the order of magnitude against which the outcome of the negotiation will be measured. The timetable set by the meeting’s own promoters fixes closure by 2026: four months remain.