“My colleagues felt betrayed because the EPP did not respect the deal and they voted together with the Patriots [on] several amendments,” Negrescu said. “[That] is a problem because you see rapporteurs from EPP or shadow [rapporteurs] incapable of keeping the unity” of the group.
After the EPP pulled its move, S&D, Renew and the Greens decided to vote against the text as a whole, alongside the Patriots who, despite their success in getting the migration amendments passed, regarded the resolution itself as “unacceptable,” Hungarian MEP Tamás Deutsch said.
“If you like relying on the far right, then maybe you will get an amendment passed, but you will not get the budget passed,” Andersen observed.
The EPP, for its part, later reprimanded the S&D for having siding with the Patriots to bring the resolution down, saying on their Spanish X account: “Opposites attract.”
But not everyone within the EPP agreed with its decision to side with the extremists: “This was the decision of the group. Personally, I thought it was a mistake,” the EPP’s lead MEP on the file, Andrzej Halicki, told POLITICO.
“We should not give space to the enemies of Europe and have a naive view that they act in good faith, especially since these issues were covered in the text of the resolution. They did not add anything new. I hope that in the future this will not be the case.”
Halicki, however, himself voted in favor of the far-right amendments.
This isn’t the first time political squabbles over migration have affected the EU’s annual budget. In April 2023 a similar situation took place during the approval of the 2024 budget.
