10/09/2025
The EU’s 2028–2034 budget proposal centralises the new ‘shiny’ priorities of the European Commission while nationalising cohesion, social and agricultural funds and undermining regional ownership. It paves the way to a ‘Hunger Games’ of priorities and risks division, weakened cohesion and the loss of Europe’s integrative glue.
When the Commission President presented her 2028–2034 EU budget back in mid-July, I understood the secrecy surrounding the preparation of the new MFF proposal. From behind the smokescreen of simplification and efficiency, a monster emerged in the form of a budget aiming at swallowing, among other things, cohesion policy, – and cracking its backbone by nationalising, centralising and defunding it.
When I read the proposal, I immediately thought of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games: a glittering Capitol using ‘games’ to maintain a pathological order in the empire. I called the proposal the ‘Big Ugly Bill’ – after President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – as reading it sent chills down my spine. With it, the typical Trumpian transactional spirit seems to be creeping into the European Commission.
In simple terms, what is the deal the Commission President offers to the EU’s national leaders? Half of the Union’s budget goes to member states through flexible national envelopes. In return, the Commission retains control of the other half, dedicated to big, shiny things such as investments in giga-factories. The deal consists basically in offering national governments full nationalisation and flexibility for cohesion, social and agricultural funds – approximately half of the budget – to get carte blanche for a new competitiveness fund: a centralised, territorially blind investment tool.
Why is the deal ugly?
Coming from Central Eastern Europe, I have an instinctive suspicion whenever a central committee starts talking about top-down ‘five-year industrialisation plans’. Living in Budapest today, I have also developed a very practical allergy to the idea that centralisation and nationalisation can solve all problems.
I read it as technocratic populism. It points to real pain, but I am sceptical about the proposed cure. The Commission says it will reduce EU-level programmes from 52 to 16, and operational programmes from more than 500 to 28 plans. How? By dumping everything into one big monstrous fund (the so-called European Fund for Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion, Agriculture and Rural, Fisheries and Maritime, Prosperity and Security). One fund, one rule. But this does not make complexity disappear – it only displaces it. Reducing operational programmes – but how? By nationalising regional programmes. Rewriting, with a budget proposal, the idea and spirit of a ‘Europe of and with the Regions’.
The old and the new
The proposal divides EU priorities into two categories. A first bag: the new shiny priorities – competitiveness, defence, technology, global EU and space. The second one: the ‘old’ boring priorities, weighed down by debts of every kind. Social, territorial and economic cohesion; agriculture; migration; climate and biodiversity; just transition and paying back the NextGenerationEU loan.
The deal centralises the first bag – the shiny new priorities – in Brussels, while the second bag, full of conflicts and obligations, is divided into national envelopes. Each one has a relatively big number written on it and a note: deal with farmers, people, border control, migration, cities and regions… Just do not bring your tractors to Brussels again.
At first glance, such a flexible national envelope may look tempting – like Bilbo drawn to the ‘Ring of Power’ in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. But take a second glance and you see the leash attached: conditionalities about ‘reforms’ inspired by the Recovery and Resilience Facility. A control mechanism that gives more power to the Commission. National governments get lump sums but no longer have to involve their regions in shared management. Cohesion policy – Europe’s most democratic, place-based tool – is dissolved into a monster fund in which local voices are drowned out.
Cohesion as investment, not charity
Cohesion policy has been the EU’s most important long-term investment and stabilising tool. It is available to all regions and relies on their ownership. It ensures that no matter where people live – whether in a metropolis or a rural village – regions and cities have the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Cohesion is not charity. It is an investment tool. Through shared incentives, it mainstreams European priorities into every project. Cohesion funding also requires considering rainwater preservation, energy-efficient street lighting, renewable energy production, accessibility, citizen participation, gender equality, walking and cycling, and biodiversity. In this way, cohesion teaches Europe to act as a Union: it is a school of European integration.
The Hunger Games logic
By throwing all funds into one closed bag, the proposal turns European solidarity into a Hunger Games. Inside each national envelope, farmers will be pitted against cities, migration against social services, child poverty against border control, climate adaptation against mitigation, housing against roads, and biodiversity against food security.
With limited funds, short-term emergencies will always trump long-term investment. Political noise will outweigh strategic needs. And those who lose out will be the ones without the loudest voice. Instead of building trust across Europe, the budget risks fuelling new resentments within each member state.
Draghi’s shadow
Of course, the official myth is Mario Draghi’s report. He tells us that either Europe becomes competitive or it dies.
But here comes the paradox: the EU budget is not really Europe’s budget. It is only around 1 per cent of EU GDP – a fraction compared to national budgets. And yet, it is the only money that actually binds Europe together. It is the glue, the transcendental minimum of solidarity. And now we risk turning the glue into solvent.
Maybe unwillingly, Draghi sets up a nice Lacanian opposition: you must choose, but whatever you choose, you lose. If you choose only competitiveness, you destroy cohesion – and without cohesion, there is no competitive Europe. If you choose only cohesion, you risk inefficiency. The ‘truth’ of the EU is not in choosing one side. The EU survives only by holding contradictory demands together. Europe is not weak because it lives with contradictions. Europe is Europe because it lives with them: cohesion and competitiveness, sovereignty and unity, freedom and security.
Photo credits: Shutterstock.com/DesignRage
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