In its opinion on the new MFF 2028-2034, adopted in January 2026, the EESC warned that the Commission’s proposed increase falls short of what is needed, calling instead for a substantial boost in real resources. EESC Info spoke to the three rapporteurs for the MFF opinion ─ Konstantinos Diamantouros, Dominika Biegon and Luca Jahier ─ about the key political priorities for ensuring a sound EU budget that will secure Europe’s strategic autonomy, while remaining decentralised and strongly anchored at regional level.

The Committee’s message is clear: the EU’s ambitions cannot be delivered on the cheap, and the MFF is ultimately a political choice about Europe’s future. What should be the guiding political priorities to ensure that the next EU budget strengthens cohesion, competitiveness and citizens’ trust in the European project?

Konstantinos Diamantouros (EESC Employers' Group): According to the Draghi report, achieving the goals of the digital and green transitions requires an additional EUR 750-800 billion of investments per year. While most of this will come from the private sector alongside improvements to the framework conditions for businesses operating in Europe, public investment will nevertheless play an important role.

At a time when Europe is facing growing geopolitical and economic headwinds — and when new priorities such as defence have emerged alongside traditional ones — the EESC is convinced that the next MFF must be significantly strengthened for the 2028–2034 period.

This means, amongst other things, preserving the central role of cohesion policy in the next MFF, with a dedicated budget, and ensuring that the conditionalities linked to the disbursement of funds under the National and Regional Partnership Plans are strictly aligned with the objectives of regional policy, rather than being macroeconomic in nature.

It is also paramount to maintain the focus on competitiveness by safeguarding the proposed budget increases for industrial development (European Competitiveness Fund), research and innovation (Horizon Europe) and cross-border energy and transport interconnections (TEN-T and TEN-E).

And finally, new own resources must strike the right balance: increasing revenues without undermining the EU’s competitiveness.

The EESC stresses that cohesion, good governance, and strong social rules are essential to making EU funding effective and future-proof. How can the next MFF be designed to strengthen these principles, while avoiding the risk that simplification leads to centralisation and weaker regional involvement?

Dominika Biegon (EESC Workers' Group): We must ensure that public funding serves public purposes. Social conditionality is a key tool in achieving this. The EESC suggests introducing provisions to ensure that only companies meeting social criteria are eligible for EU funding. These could include site retention and employment guarantees, education and training measures, and respect for collective agreements. Good examples already exist in some Member States. The EU should lead by example. The future EU budget should uphold social dialogue and create quality jobs. This is how we can increase acceptance of the green and digital transitions.

Another key aspect of making EU funding more effective is the partnership principle. The European Commission is proposing a more centralised structure for cohesion funds, giving Member State governments greater control over cohesion policy. This represents a fundamental departure from the previous bottom-up approach, under which regions and the social partners played a leading role in designing and implementing cohesion funds.

Together with the Committee of the Regions, the EESC strongly criticises this shift in power from the regional to the national level. To ensure that the EU budget delivers on the ground and remains visible in the regions, the partnership principle must be strengthened. The EESC calls for its genuine application at all stages — from drafting NRPP chapters to project selection, management and monitoring — as well as increased resources for social partner capacity-building and binding co-determination rights, including veto rights on key decisions in monitoring committees.

The EESC warns that the EU cannot respond to global competition, climate change and security challenges with a budget designed for the past. In your view, what specific steps are needed to ensure that the next MFF provides sufficient real investment capacity to turn the EU’s strategic autonomy from a slogan into reality?

Luca Jahier (EESC Civil Society Organisations' Group): The proposed next MFF is clearly not fit for the many and growing challenges Europe is facing.  The EESC was the first to say this — a position now echoed by the European Parliament.

The Draghi report, published one year before the MFF proposal, called for an additional EUR 800 billion in investment per year over ten years, with 60% coming from private capital. One and a half years later, Draghi revised this figure to EUR 1.2 trillion per year over the next decade, with at least 60% now expected to come from public funding and investment instruments. This is mainly due to rising crisis-related costs, the acceleration of the energy and technological transitions, and increased defence spending.

We consider it unacceptable that, once inflation and NGEU repayments are taken into account, the marginal increase in the Commission’s proposal amounts to only around +0.1–0.2%, while significant cuts are made to traditional policies (CAP, cohesion, social funds and others) to free up resources for competitiveness and global Europe priorities. Pending the Council's 'negotiating box', a group of so-called ‘frugal’ capitals is even pushing for further reductions, while still failing to agree on crucial own resources. That we welcome, but resources need to be increased.

The first priority must be to transform what is currently a survival budget into a genuinely political one. This could be achieved through several concrete measures:

• Exclude the EUR 149 billion allocated to NGEU repayments (0.11% of EU GNI) from heading 1, placing it above the budget ceiling and financing it through dedicated new own resources, as originally foreseen under the RRF regulation.
• Adopt a comprehensive and ambitious set of new own resources, replacing the most contested ones (such as the CORE proposal) with alternatives, including a digital services tax.
• Use part of the budget to leverage private capital, building on the success of the Juncker Plan (EFSI I and II).
• Resort to specific new EU borrowing to finance EU common goods, mainly linked to competitiveness and security priorities, thus significantly increasing the final budget.
• Accelerate the Capital Markets Union to increase the volume of EU private capital invested in the EU and attract new placements and investments from abroad, as a secure option in times of high turbulence. The creation of a solid EU fiscal space, through a stable market for EU bonds, could accelerate this process.