Everybody seems to be talking about the next long-term budget, but one question is missing: who will still be able to see where the money goes and whether it works? For Elena Calistru, president of the EESC’s Section for Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion (ECO), the real story of the next MFF is not just about figures or priorities, but about a shift that could make EU spending less transparent, less accountable and further removed from the people it is meant to serve.

By Elena Calistru

Most of the conversation about the next MFF has been about numbers – how big it should be and who gets what slice of defence, cohesion, competitiveness or climate. Fair enough; that’s where the money is. But underneath those arguments is a change I find more interesting, and that I hear almost no one discussing: how far the decisions about this money will sit from the people it is meant to reach.

The proposal folds fourteen funds into national plans, with money released as governments hit targets they’ve agreed with the Commission. It is pitched as a turn toward results and on paper it does look tidier – fewer programmes, cleaner reporting, more or less a finance minister’s dream. What it also does is pull the centre of gravity upward, away from regions and local actors and toward national capitals, and further from the places where a renovated school or a retrained worker is the only evidence most people will ever have that Europe did anything for them.

That distance has a cost we tend not to name. The people closest to a project – a city hall, a local NGO, a trade union branch – are usually the only ones who can say whether a target met actually ‘achieved’ or changed anything in real life, or just produced a very persuasive report. Their presence is what keeps the system honest, which matters rather more than the ‘consultation’ box it normally gets filed under. Take them out of the room and Europe doesn’t end up with a clearer view of its own spending; it ends up more sure of itself.

And this should worry the whole Committee, not only those of us who stand for organised civil society. The European project runs on consent – on people half-believing it does something for them where they actually live. A budget that’s harder to see, and harder to check, can be perfectly efficient and still disappear from view in exactly the places that decide whether Europe holds together. By all means, let’s fight over the numbers. I’d just rather we didn’t win that argument and lose the point of it.

Elena Calistru is the president of the European Economic and Social Committee’s Section for Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion (ECO) and a member of the EESC’s Civil Society Organisations’ Group.