EU reaches deal on 2014-2020 budget

EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has announced a political deal on the EU's hotly contested 2014-2020 trillion-euro budget.

Barroso said a deal had been reached at emergency talks between the commission, which is the EU executive, the European parliament leadership, and Ireland, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency. But the accord on the budget, which has been disputed for months, must still be formally approved by parliament's 754 MPs.

Barroso had called high-level breakfast talks in hopes of unlocking the European Union's next seven-year budget just hours before the bloc's 27 heads of state and government gather for a two-day summit.

"Today we have agreed on this budget that will make investment in Europe possible," Barroso said on Thursday. "This is the growth fund for Europe."

The top item on the summit agenda is to agree quick spending on jobs and training for the 5.6 million under 25-year-olds currently unemployed across the EU, victims of the years of tough austerity policies enforced to beat Europe's debt crisis.

Read more: EU reaches deal on 2014-2020 budget | The Australian

EU on brink of historic budget cut after all-nighter in Brussels - by Nicholas Watt and Ian Traynor

European leaders were inching towards a deal in the early hours of Friday morning that would see the first cut in the EU's budget in its 56-year history.

David Cameron, who had demanded a freeze in real terms in the near-€1tn budget, was planning to claim victory after the European council president proposed a €34.4bn cut over the next seven years.
Herman Van Rompuy finally tabled his budget proposals in Brussels at 6am after a night of haggling at the EU summit that was described by one official as like a "bazaar".

Shortly before 6.30am, the EU's 27 leaders filed into the council chamber to debate Van Rompuy's proposal to cut the "payment ceiling", likened to a credit card limit, for the next seven-year budget from €942.8bn to €908.4bn. Van Rompuy proposed cutting the higher "commitment ceiling" from €993.6bn for the last budget from 2007-13 to €960bn for 2014-20.

Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president who was the EU's budget commissioner during the last negotiations in 2005, indicated at around 4am that the EU was on the verge of agreeing its first budget cut. The EU has agreed seven-year budgets since 1993.

Read more: EU on brink of historic budget cut after all-nighter in Brussels | World news | The Guardian