The EU's next budget: bigger stakes, same mistakes?

The Recovery and Resilience Facility quietly closed on Monday night. It was the final deadline for EU member states to complete reforms and investments and still get paid. Now, just days later, ministers are gathered at Dublin Castle to fight over the EU's next seven-year budget: what gets funded, what gets prioritised and what gets cut. The 'frugals' want a smaller budget. The Friends of Cohesion want to defend cohesion spending to the last euro. I have spent more than 15 years reading public budgets, first as a civic activist in Bucharest, now presiding over the economic section of the EU's house of organised civil society. I have learned that arguments about size are rarely the ones that matter most. This time, even less so. This is no ordinary budget. Defence, competitiveness, climate, perhaps enlargement: name your poison. This is a budget written under real geopolitical pressure and a decision about what kind of power Europe intends to be. It should not be negotiated as an accountancy exercise or a fight between rival fan clubs, especially when the prototype of its future delivery model has just come to an end. What the prototype taught Let's give the recovery fund its due eulogy. Europe borrowed together, giving the euro the safe asset it had lacked since birth. That half worked. It is therefore legitimate to ask why we should not keep doing it. The other half I watched up close in my own country. The plans for implementing the RRF were negotiated between governments, the Commission and, more or less, nobody else. Regions and local authorities often found out what was being done in their name after decisions had been made. Businesses and civil society organisations like mine were consulted the way you consult a wall: the meeting happened, the box was ticked. And the messy ending starts there. Because the people who work with those who need help were rarely in the room, nobody defined performance properly either. A milestone could count as met because a law had been adopted, whether or not anything changed for a single person. The same absence ran through implementation. With nobody close enough to the ground to spot problems early, difficulties surfaced late, plans had to be renegotiated, and money was still being handed back on the final day. Centralisation did not deliver, at least not to the level of expectations the RRF had raised. I remember the EESC's mid-term evaluation missions in several member states and how high the hopes were that the EU finally found a way to direct money towards the investment priorities we so badly need. The next budget adopts this so-called performance delivery model and extends it to cohesion and agriculture. The honest question is whether the plans will be designed, run and checked better than the last ones. Can we just focus on defence and competitiveness? I come from the Eastern flank, and I want defence spending to be real. 3.5% of GDP is not an abstraction where I live. We now have drones not only in our immediate neighbourhood but also on our soil. It is not great to hear your grandmother worrying about a drone landing in her apple tree. But the number is the smallest part of it. Pun intended. Defence should not just be about how much we spend on arms and fighter jets. Defence is also the bridge that can carry the tank, the hospital that can take casualties and a society that cannot be talked out of its own interests by some bot farm on social media. Defence is also the democratic and social fabric of a society. It determines whether a country under pressure can keep democracy alive. A budget that funds the hardware while treating the fabric as decoration does only half the job. Europe used to know this. My favourite piece of budget trivia is what Jean Monnet did when he was handed the reconstruction of France in 1946. He did not lock the Treasury in a room with a spreadsheet. He created modernisation commissions, bringing industrialists together with trade unionists, engineers and civil servants, and made them agree on targets before the plan went to government. The Treaty of Rome later turned that method into the table I now sit at: the European Economic and Social Committee. The insight was simple: rebuilding is done by the people who make real things. Europe's capacity is still built around the same three constituencies: the employers who will build the plants, the unions who will train the workers and the civic organisations already working with local communities. They deserve a seat at the table. Support for a stronger Europe is real. It is also fragile. For the first time in my adult life, majorities across Europe want a Union capable of defending itself. That support is genuine, but we can lose it in two predictable ways. I would love to be proven wrong on both. The first is opacity. Move hundreds of billions through national plans, procurement exemptions and classifications, checked by nobody the public has ever heard of, and the first corruption scandal will be lethal. Our adversaries will not even need to invent it. Amplifying it will do the work in an information space where we keep treating critical thinking as a luxury. The second is resentment. If people conclude that politicians are signing huge rearmament contracts while their hospital remains unbuilt and their wages are squeezed, 'guns before bread' becomes the cheapest slogan on the continent. The antidote to both is the same. It is not a communications strategy or a nice, short reel on social media. It is having people at the table and money people can see. In the EESC's January plenary, employers, workers and citizens' organisations agreed almost unanimously: partnership at every stage of national plans, from design to implementation and monitoring, should be written into the regulations rather than left to guidance everyone forgets by the second payment request. We need monitoring committees with real co-determination and resources to make participation meaningful in Vaslui, not just Vaasa. The Commission has already promised a mandatory regional check. Giving social partners and civil society the same guarantee would cost the presidency exactly one article. So, to the Irish presidency, which has put civil society at the heart of its programme: finish the thought. A strong partnership article and monitoring committees belong in October's text, alongside the amounts. To Team Frugals: you want performance. So do we. Performance needs witnesses. The strongest safeguard for effective spending is not another reporting requirement. It is the presence of independent voices able to monitor, challenge and improve implementation from the ground up. To the Friends of Cohesion: perhaps stop defending envelopes and start defending our common rules. An envelope is easy to trade at three in the morning. A seat in the room is harder to take away. Elena Calistru is President of the Section for Economic and Monetary Union and Economic and Social Cohesion at the European Economic and Social Committee.