From left to right: Piotr Serafin, Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration, Séamus Boland, EESC President, and MEP Carla Tavares.
The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) argues that the next multiannual financial framework (MFF) needs to be bigger than the European Commission has proposed. The EESC also insists that civil society must be fully involved in discussions on the draft, warning that the role played by regions in managing EU funds is in danger of being watered down.
The Commission’s draft MFF, the EU’s long-term budget for 2028-2034, was presented in July 2025 and amounts to EUR 1.816 trillion. The EESC discussed the draft during the plenary session as part of the preparations for an opinion, due in January 2026 and building on the EESC’s April 2025 mid-term revision assessment. The Committee calls for a transparent, forward-looking and inclusive budget that fully involves regional and local authorities, social partners and civil society.
‘The Commission’s proposals for the MFF take some steps in the right direction, rationalising instruments and increasing flexibility to respond to the multi-layered crises Europe faces. But flexibility must always be accompanied by robust guarantees of transparency, inclusiveness and accountability,’ said EESC president Séamus Boland. ‘Our Union can only remain resilient if those closest to the ground – regional and local actors, social partners and organised civil society – remain fully involved in shaping where and how funds are spent’.
ECO Section President Elena Calistru supported the ambition of a more modern MFF structure, emphasising both adaptation and realism: ‘I am glad the proposal embraces such a transformation of the MFF’s architecture. We cannot escape the fact that we need to adapt to a very changed reality. We want civil society to be part of this conversation; we should be engaged in the planning, implementation and monitoring of the MFF’.
Ionuț Sibian emphasised that ‘a vibrant civil society is not a luxury; it is a necessity for a resilient democracy. We call for advocacy to be explicitly recognised, but we would also like to see a more explicit operational grant to be authorised across all parts of the AgoraEU Programme’.
Co-rapporteur of the opinion on Global Europe (Multiannual Financial Framework proposal), Luca Jahier, addressed what he called ‘the elephant in the room; the volume of the MFF’. He warned that ‘re-enforcing the new priorities more than needed – strategic autonomy, defence, competitiveness – will introduce consistent constraints on traditional core priorities established by the Treaties, such as the Cohesion Policy, Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and the European Social Fund’.
Justyna Ochędzan underlined that ‘the budget should be in line with the values and the Treaties, and not just calculations and numbers if we want to build a resilient, inclusive and democratic society’.
Read the EESC’s press release: https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/press-releases/bolder-eu-budget-demanded-eesc-warns-against-centralisation
Read more on European Economic and Social Committee
