From Estonia on the Baltic to Macedonia in the Balkans, central and eastern Europe has welcomed the outcome of a testy EU summit that threatened to leave new members out of pocket and aspiring hopefuls out in the cold.
Despite vilification from the right-wing press at home, British prime minister Tony Blair was widely praised for relinquishing some of Britain's rebate to boost funds for this region, while Macedonia celebrated becoming an official EU candidate.
Arduous talks finally ended with a €862.4 billion budget for 2007-13, €157 billion of which will go to the 10, mostly ex-communist, new member states and Romania and Bulgaria, which are scheduled to join on January 1st, 2007.
That is €4.7 billion more than Britain had offered earlier, but €7 billion less than Luxembourg proposed during its presidency in the first half of this year.
Poland, which aligned with France to pressure Britain into cutting its rebate and increasing aid for new members, won some €2.3 billion that would have been lost under the earlier budget format, while Slovakia, Lithuania and Bulgaria were promised more than €1.4 billion to help decommission Soviet-era nuclear power stations.
"I consider myself a young man and I feel young now and all I can say to this is 'yes, yes, yes!'" said an exuberant Polish premier, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.
"If we properly invest these funds, if we use them like Ireland and Spain have done, then we will be able to support Poland's development," he declared.
Hungary also hailed an agreement that it helped broker in recent weeks.
"Hungary managed to defend its interests in those tough negotiations," said prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. "We fought hard and we welcome the deal."
Estonian prime minister Andrus Ansip said the tense talks had yielded a good deal for his small country, a sentiment shared by his Baltic neighbours.
"We can leave the EU summit with the knowledge that we have enough money to lift our economic and social life even more rapidly to the level of older EU member states," he said.
Perhaps Macedonia celebrated hardest, however, after becoming the first country to gain EU candidate status since Croatia in 2004.
"Today we got a visa for our European path," declared Vlado Buckovski, prime minister of the former Yugoslav republic.
"Macedonia finally leaves the Balkan road paved with cobblestones and joins a highway that leads to Europe."