EU leaders face budget divisions, discuss Ukraine at Brussels summit

There was big disagreement on this issue of the long-term budget. So this is the budget that is set to run from 2028 till 2034. And as usual, we have the northern frugal European countries wanting to make cuts and the southern and eastern EU countries, plus the European Commission and the European Parliament, wanting the budget to grow, at least in line with inflation. So there's this big standoff on that. And it seems like the sides just became more entrenched yesterday. Now, the Council Chair, Antonio Costa, is really desperate to get an agreement on this by the end of the year. He won't explicitly say it, but it's clearly because of the risk of Marine Le Pen being elected president of France next spring and torpedoing the whole budget. So he would want to lock in this new budget before she could take office. But as yesterday, as the leaders were coming in, they clearly had no urgency. We heard from the Swedish prime minister he was in no hurry, that there was no need for an agreement by the end of the year. Well, French President Emmanuel Macron turned that on its head in yesterday's discussions, saying that there was no way, if a budget isn't agreed by the end of the year, there's no way he could approve it in the couple of months between December and April. So it has to be agreed this year. Now, they're working on an Irish position that was put forward. Nobody's happy with that. it was a compromise between the frugals and the rest but the frugals thought it didn't cut enough the rest thought it cut too much so Antonio Costa has now taken control from the Irish he's going to come out with a new idea new negotiating box that's going to rely more on own resources that's EU level taxation a bunch of different ideas for that and he has called a new emergency summit for the 26th of November so they will all be back here then and that's ahead of their regularly scheduled winter summit at the end of December, middle of December. And so it's hoped that between those two summits, they can work on a new draft negotiation text from Antonio Costa that could get them over the line. But there is huge, huge disagreement here. They are still so far apart. And they walked out of there with no agreement. They also didn't have an agreement on what to do about energy prices. Italy and a bunch of Eastern EU countries want to suspend the EU's emissions trading system, the bedrock of its climate policy. But Western and Northern European countries are dead set against that. So again, no agreement yesterday on that either.