The European Union’s spending plans are up in the air ahead of a summit of member states’ leaders in Brussels next week.

The outcome of the summit, which has been called to discuss the EU’s long-term budget for 2014-20 (22-23 November), could also determine the fate of the budget for 2013, which has still not been approved, only weeks before it is supposed to take effect.

Talks on the annual budget, and on an amending budget for 2012, broke down acrimoniously on Tuesday (13 November), with members of the European Parliament accusing representatives of the member states of not acting in good faith.

A blocking minority of eight member states, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, rejected the Commission’s request that an extra €9 billion be added to the budget for 2012. The European Parliament’s negotiators, led by centre-right French MEP Alain Lamassoure, then refused to attend negotiations on the 2013 budget that had been scheduled for Tuesday with member states’ budget or finance ministers. A midnight deadline for the adoption of the 2013 budget was not met, meaning that the Commission must restart the process of proposing a budget.

Lamassoure and the other MEPs expressed irritation after Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and the budget, conceded during an earlier round of negotiations on Friday (9 November) that €1.4bn out of the €9bn request was not needed for disbursement this year. His compromise proposal to carry the €1.4bn over into next year as part of the 2013 budget failed to convince the member states that the money was necessary. “Treasury ministers don’t care whether it’s going to be paid today or tomorrow,” a minister said. “They only want to know how much.”

“If negotiations had been successful tonight this would have been a good omen for the MFF [talks] next week,” Lamassoure told European Voice after the talks collapsed. “But now there is no good omen.” The MFF, which will set spending ceilings for the EU’s programmes and determine the sources of revenue, cannot take effect without the approval of the European Parliament. The negotiations between the MEPs and the Council on the 2013 budget could affect their later talks on the MFF. Equally, failure by the member states to agree on the MFF next week could further poison the atmosphere for negotiations on the 2013 budget, diminishing the chances that a budget will be in place by 1 January.

The prospects for the summit improved yesterday (14 November) with the publication of a new draft of the multi-annual financial framework. The draft, the first to be produced by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, foresees cuts of around €75bn to the €1,033bn MFF proposed by the European Commission. This is a deeper reduction than the €50bn identified by Cyprus, which was in charge of previous drafts. But the cuts are applied more evenly across the budget headings, with less attempt to set priorities. Of Van Rompuy’s cuts, €30bn are split more or less evenly between funding for agricultural policy and for cohesion policy.

The European Commission said in a statement that Van Rompuy’s draft “preserves the balance and order of priorities of the Commission proposal but foresees significant reductions in overall amounts allocated”.

However, there is still a very real chance of no agreement at the summit. Several member states, including the United Kingdom, France, Sweden and Hungary, have suggested that they will use their veto if certain demands are not met. The UK is adamant that there must be a freeze in the overall size of the MFF. On an issue that is certain to provoke heated debate next week, Birgitta Ohlsson, Sweden’s Europe minister, said that it was “provocative” to cut her country’s rebate while other member states’ rebates were being increased, as proposed by Van Rompuy. Denmark has also threatened a veto to protect its demand for a rebate.

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