Martin Schulz, far right, with his fellow EU presidents ahead of budget talks on Monday.

Just how bleak do things look for next week’s summit intended to reach a deal on the EU’s next €1tn seven-year budget?

Only hours after French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault threw cold water on the latest compromise effort, another major player in the game – Martin Schulz, the European parliament president – said he now expected the high-stakes summit to come up empty.

“I’m very sceptical about an agreement next week,” Schulz told a small group of Brussels-based reporters, arguing that the compromise put out yesterday by Herman Van Rompuy, European Council president, was significantly different from that offered by the Cypriot presidency just two weeks ago – a sign of “how deep the division is within the Council.”

Van Rompuy’s proposal (a leaked copy of which we’ve posted here) has set off another round of recriminations, helping turn a meeting this morning of EU ambassadors into a complaint-fest, diplomats said. But Schulz said he believed the biggest stumbling block remained Britain, which is the only country calling for a complete EU budget freeze. Read more