BRUSSELS — Almost 60 members of the European Parliament want to include a gift in the bloc’s next long-term budget: a phone with more storage for Ursula von der Leyen.

Right-wing politicians filed an amendment on Thursday to the EU’s budget bill, telling the EU executive to “dedicate sufficient funding to provide the president of the Commission with a mobile phone with adequate storage capacity and appropriate IT support to ensure that messages are preserved without exception.”

Von der Leyen got in hot water last month over a deleted 2024 text message she received from French President Emmanuel Macron that POLITICO reported had urged her to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal.

The Commission said the message was auto-deleted, defending von der Leyen’s use of disappearing messages as being, in part, “for space reasons.” But tech experts debunked that defense as “a non-argument” and ” hard to believe,” because text messages hardly take any space on modern phones.

The Commission president already faced an investigation earlier over text conversations with Pfizer’s Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla about Covid-19 vaccine contracts which were never archived.

Lawmakers are due to vote on the EU’s draft budget for 2026 at a plenary session in Strasbourg next week.

The amendment on phone storage came from Germany far-right member Christine Anderson and Swedish hard-right member Charlie Weimers. It had been signed by 57 members of parliament on Thursday, largely from Weimers’ European Conservative and Reformists group, Anderson’s Europe Sovereign Nations and the far-right Patriots for Europe.

The amendment urged the EU executive to mind “importance of keeping proper records of all official communications of the Commission.”