The threat of internal rebellion within the European Commission (EC) has led its president, Ursula von der Leyen, to back down and promise more money to poor regions than initially planned when she presented her plan for the EU’s seven-year budget on Wednesday.
According to a document seen by POLITICO, von der Leyen has made a series of last-minute concessions in an attempt to appease two of her team members at opposite ends of the political spectrum – Italian right-wing Commissioner Raffaele Fito and Romanian Socialist Roxana Minzatu.
The reversal signals the delicate path she must navigate to preserve her Commission’s competing votes while presenting a spending plan that will work for the increasingly recalcitrant European Parliament and the 27 national governments, all of whom must approve the budget before the end of 2027.
The move, which would see the Commission continue to allocate a large portion of its funding to poorer regions of Europe from 2028 onwards, is seen as enough to secure the political support of the 27 EU commissioners, two EU officials told POLITICO.
"The regional dimension is not completely lost" of the draft budget, said an EU official who, like others quoted in this article, was granted anonymity to speak freely.
Von der Leyen’s decision is a departure from her original plan to significantly increase central governments’ powers in managing EU regional funds, which currently stand at €400 billion and make up a third of the bloc’s total spending.
The idea was that empowering national capitals would act as an incentive to complete reforms and cut red tape. But critics said it would only deepen existing inequalities within individual countries, leaving regions out of the process.
The whole issue is somewhat of a hot topic for the EU. Supporting individual regions within countries has played a key role since the introduction of the so-called cohesion policy in the 1970s to reduce the gap between poorer and richer areas in Europe.
Critics have welcomed von der Leyen's concessions but have lingering suspicions that they amount to little more than politics.
"They are only making minimal concessions, but their initial ideas were so unpopular that they had to back down," said Siegfried Mureşan, the Parliament's budget negotiator for von der Leyen's own centre-right European People's Party.
The latest move came after von der Leyen met with commissioners and senior officials at the weekend.
According to the internal document, the Commission is promising to "reduce regional imbalances in the union and the backwardness of less-favoured regions and to promote European territorial cooperation".
However, these concessions are unlikely to be enough to quell criticism from MEPs and several governments.
Supporters of cohesion policy are calling on von der Leyen to maintain a set of criteria - known as the Berlin formula - that allocates a major share of funds to the bloc's less-developed regions.
The document, which could still be revised before its presentation on Wednesday, states that poorer countries - measured by total population, national wealth per capita, rural poverty and regional product per person - will still receive the bulk of the money.
However, critics point out that central governments will have a greater say than before over how much of this funding should reach the regions.
"It is not yet "We have seen another credible alternative to the Berlin formula," said Mureşan. "And we also know that past attempts to change it have failed." In another late-night concession, the Commission kept the European Social Fund (ESF) - which is designed to train young people and the unemployed - and other programmes that were thought to have disappeared from the budget.