New EU budget plan: expanded support for regional development and agriculture

The draft European Union budget for the period 2028-2034 will be substantially modified, in terms of allocations for regional development and for supporting farmers, according to a document submitted by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, to Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, quoted by the German press agency dpa.

According to the cited source, the regions and the European Parliament will be given a more important role in decisions on the allocation of funds, additional guarantees will be granted for agriculture, part of the allocation will be reserved for the development of rural areas and MEPs will be directly involved in the process of distributing and reviewing the EU budget. These adjustments made by the European Commission come in response to strong criticism in the European Parliament, where political group leaders accused the budget initially proposed at the end of June for the period 2028-2034 of reducing the importance of key sectors by merging funds into a single, huge and opaque mechanism.

The decision to recalibrate is not just technical, but deeply political. With a budget of around two trillion euros, 700 billion euros more than for the period 2021-2027, the stakes reflect the strategic direction of the Union for the next decade. MEPs warned that agricultural areas and rural communities, already vulnerable to global economic changes and market pressures, risked becoming collateral victims of an administrative reorganisation designed in Brussels. They warned that eliminating separate funds for rural development and agricultural policy could transform priorities into abstract objectives, disconnected from reality on the ground, where small farms are disappearing and young people are migrating to cities for lack of prospects.

The letter sent by von der Leyen to Roberta Metsola and the rotating presidency of the EU Council marks an attempt to rebalance the power relations between the European institutions. Parliament is calling not just for symbolic consultation, but for actual co-decision in the configuration and adjustment of national financing plans. The very definition of European democracy is at stake: whoever controls the money controls the political direction of the Union.

In reality, this dispute brings to light the structural tension that has been grinding the European Union for years: the difference between the centralizing vision of the community institutions and the regions' claim to political autonomy. Redefining the budget thus becomes a battlefield for the identity of the European project.