By Marek Tatala, CEO of the Economic Freedom Foundation, a Polish think-tank.
The next EU budget should be judged by one basic test: whether it is genuinely European in purpose, not merely in branding.
A budget is not European simply because the money is spent through Brussels. It is not European because national governments, sectoral lobbies and regional authorities attach EU language to domestic spending demands. And it is certainly not European when it becomes a piggy bank for national interest groups or political promises of the member states.
A genuinely European budget should finance what truly belongs at the European level: the Single Market, cross-border infrastructure, common security, external borders, and research cooperation that no member state can deliver alone as efficiently as the EU. It should strengthen Europe where Europe adds value. It should not replicate national budgets with weaker accountability and lower efficiency.
This is the core message of EPICENTER’s recent report on an alternative EU budget. The report does not deny that Europe faces serious challenges: security threats, weak competitiveness, the energy transition and demographic pressure. But it asks a more important question: does every real problem require more EU-level spending? The answer is no.
Pytanie brzmi nie „ile?”, lecz „na co?”. W alternatywnym budżecie UE @epicenterEU zwraca uwagę, że unijne wydatki powinny koncentrować się na tym, co naprawdę europejskie – jednolitym rynku, bezpieczeństwie, ochronie granic i infrastrukturze transgranicznej. 3/3…
— Fundacja Wolności Gospodarczej (@WolnaGospodarka) May 26, 2026
EPICENTER proposes a simple test. EU spending should be justified only when it is necessary to maintain or complete the Single Market and the free movement of goods, services, capital and people. A problem must be genuinely cross-border and beyond the capacity of individual member states to solve effectively on their own. The test follows the EU’s own logic: decisions should be taken, and money spent, at the level where they can deliver the best results.
Even then, policymakers should still ask whether EU spending is the right instrument, or whether deregulation, mutual recognition, regulatory simplification or national action would work better.
This test is badly needed. During a recent Euractiv and EPICENTER event on the future of the EU budget, I tried to ask three questions. Not all of them received a clear answer. But they should be repeated in discussions with those negotiating the next Multiannual Financial Framework.
The first question concerns priorities. Croatian MEP Karlo Ressler spoke about the need to strike “the right balance between old and new priorities”. The old priorities include, for example, agriculture and cohesion. The new ones include, among many other things, security and competitiveness. But does this mean that with every new MFF we simply add new priorities to the old ones?
A priority, by definition, is something that comes before something else. It implies choice. If everything is a priority, nothing is. A budget that tries to finance every historical compromise and every past or emerging crisis will not become a strategic tool for responding to today’s challenges.
The second question concerns cohesion and competitiveness. Romanian MEP Victor Negrescu argued that “old priorities are the same as the new priorities with different names”, referring to the idea that cohesion policy has also been about strengthening competitiveness, especially in newer member states.
There is an important point here. Many newer member states have grown impressively since joining the EU. Poland is an obvious example. But the key driver of this success was not simply the inflow of EU funds. It was access to the Single Market, institutional convergence, trade, investment, competition, and successful integration into European value chains. Research for Poland suggests that the impact of the Single Market on GDP growth was at least five times larger than the impact of EU subsidies.
This leads to an uncomfortable question, which I also tried to raise during the event: if hundreds of billions of euros in cohesion spending were supposed to make Europe more competitive, why is the EU still not a competitiveness superpower? Why did we need the Draghi report? Why are we still talking about Europe falling behind the United States and China?
Wealthy EU countries are ramping up a campaign to shrink the bloc’s proposed €1.8 trillion long-term budget.
Their opponents led by Romania are hitting back.
Brussels Playbook has more 👇https://t.co/w3UGo7R0G0
— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) May 26, 2026
This does not mean that all cohesion spending was useless. But we should stop treating redistribution as a synonym for competitiveness. The best European growth policy is a deeper Single Market in services, energy, digital markets and capital. It is easier scaling for firms, fewer regulatory barriers, and more room for private investment and innovation.
The third question concerns the phrase “more Europe”. Christiane Canenbley from DG Budget said that it is clear we need “not less but more Europe”. This is a familiar and often attractive slogan. But what exactly does it mean?
There is a dangerous illusion that European strength can be bought simply by expanding the EU budget. When I hear “more Europe”, I immediately want to ask: how exactly do direct payments to farmers create more Europe? How does another EU-funded local sports or cultural facility create more Europe? How does yet another training project, designed to improve workers’ skills, deepen integration?
Not every euro spent through Brussels is automatically European in the meaningful sense. And a larger EU budget also means pressure for more “own resources”, which often means reaching deeper into taxpayers’ pockets or national budgets. Today, the debate includes proposals such as CORE, TEDOR, and higher EU revenues from ETS and CBAM. If “more Europe” becomes a synonym for ever larger budgets, each new MFF will bring new acronyms hiding new taxes, levies and “own resources”.
From this perspective, EPICENTER’s alternative budget is in fact closer to genuine “more Europe” than proposals for a bigger budget from the European Commission and Parliament. It gives priority to what is truly European. That is the right direction. The EU does not need a larger budget in nominal terms. It needs a more European budget: clearer, leaner and more honest about trade-offs.
EPICENTER’s test is a good starting point. Does the spending support free movement? Does it reduce cross-border frictions? Does it deliver something member states cannot achieve alone? Is EU expenditure the best instrument, or would deregulation, mutual recognition or national action work better?
Many old and future items in the EU budget would fail this exam. And that is precisely why the test is useful. It forces politicians to choose. It reminds us that Europe is strongest when it focuses on what only Europe can do, such as strengthening the Single Market, not on designing ever larger budgets.
Disclaimer: www.BrusselsReport.eu will under no circumstance be held legally responsible or liable for the content of any article appearing on the website, as only the author of an article is legally responsible for that, also in accordance with the terms of use.
