BRUSSELS, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski urged European Union governments on Wednesday to preserve large EU funds for poor regions when the bloc overhauls its 130 billion euros ($164.3 billion) annual budget.
The EU’s 27 countries will launch negotiations next year on the shape of the 2014-2021 budget. Many politicians are calling for austerity following the global economic crisis, which has emptied government coffers and increased national debts.
"We expect the cohesion fund to be maintained," Komorowski said, referring to the main EU aid fund.
"It is so important to make solidarity real, to make development levels more equal," he told a news conference on his first foreign trip since he was elected in July.
Komorowski, a moderate conservative, said he would back projects leading to further European integration in contrast to his Euro-sceptic predecessor Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash in April.
Komorowski told reporters after meeting the Polish President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek that in visits to Paris and Berlin this week he would try to revive the so-called Weimar Triangle — or regular meetings of leaders and ministers from Germany, France abnd Poland.
Such meetings, which had been held from the 1990s, stalled during the presidency of Komorowski’s late predecessor Lech Kaczynski.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso made clear the bloc’s executive arm would back poorer countries from central Europe in the budget dispute which is expected to pit them against rich countries.
"There should be no doubt about the position of the Commission, my own position. I have been fighting all my life for the cohesion policy," Barroso told the news conference after talks with Komorowski.
Poland, where the wealth level is still less than 60 percent of the EU average six years after it joined the bloc, is the biggest nominal beneficiary of EU aid that funds motorway construction, environmental clean-ups and many other projects.
It is to receive some 69 billion euros in regional aid from the bloc’s long-term budget for 2007-2013. Other former communist countries from central Europe also benefit substantially from EU funds, which help them fight recession.
But EU net payers, such as Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, are balking at contributing too much to the bloc at a time they have to wind down some social welfare programmes after the worst economic crisis in decades.
Some diplomats say privately EU beneficiaries expect that the bloc’s budget will remain at least at the current level of around 1 percent of the Union’s economic output in the next long-term budget running from 2014.
Another battle line in the budget talks will concern the future of the EU’s farm subsidies, which account for more than 40 percent of the bloc’s expenditure.
Here, Poland is expected to team up with France to try to keep the subsidies against calls by countries such as Britain and Sweden that want to shift them to research, development and innovation projects.
