ZAGREB, 6 OctВ(Hina) -ВSplit will host the EU MED9 summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing together the bloc’s southern members ahead of key negotiations on the EU budget.

MED9 is an informal group of nine southern EU members: Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, France, Spain, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Portugal.

Croatia holds the group’s rotating presidency this year, and all nine leaders are expected in Split, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa will also attend, along with Monaco’s Prince Albert II, invited for his expertise on environmental issues, particularly marine conservation, and Jordan’s Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah.

Some leaders will arrive on Tuesday, with tight security already in place.

MED9 is the EU’s largest regional grouping, representing one-third of its members, 40% of its territory, 41% of its GDP and 45% of its population.

The summit will be the highlight of Croatia’s MED9 presidency, which has included three foreign ministers’Вmeetings and five sectoral ministerial meetings.

A key aim is to coordinate the Mediterranean members’Вpositions ahead of the European Council summit in Brussels a week later. The Croatian government has stressed that the MED9 summit was “deliberately timed”Вto coincide closely with the EU leaders’Вmeeting.

EU members are currently negotiating the bloc’s next seven-year budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), for 2028-2034.

The aim is to reach agreement on this key document by the end of this year so that the budget can be operational as early as the beginning of 2028, and because voters in France, Spain and Italy – three important European countries whose leaders will be present in Split – will go to the polls in 2027.

The Split summit will not include representatives of the largely northern “frugal six”В– net contributors to the EU budget that want tighter spending: the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Germany.

Their leaders said in August that the European Commission’s proposed budget should be cut by several hundred billion euros. The southern leaders gathering in Split, by contrast, are seeking a more ambitious budget that preserves major existing programmes, particularly agricultural and cohesion policies.