Another day, another power-grab in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen’s unveiling of the EU’s 2028–2034 budget was billed as a strategic moment—Europe’s grand vision for its post-Covid, post-Ukraine, post-Brexit future.
What it revealed instead was the hollowness at the heart of the European project: a muddled, technocratic behemoth blind to its own democratic deficit and increasingly divorced from the people it claims to represent.
Yet one could be forgiven, on reading much of the European media’s coverage, for thinking this was all just an unfortunate lapse in communications. A procedural misstep. A bit of internal discord to be ironed out in due course.
The Financial Times fretted over internal briefings and timing. El País lamented the rise of national plans over Brussels-led programmes. Others fixated on where the money would come from or which pet sectors might lose out.
But the real problem is deeper—and more fundamental. What is being passed off as a strategic reorientation is in fact a continuation of everything that has gone wrong with the EU in recent decades. Centralisation masked as subsidiarity. Opaque bureaucracy dressed up as democratic consensus. Grandiose budgets with no corresponding accountability. The 2028–2034 financial framework is not merely flawed in execution—it is rotten in principle.
Let’s begin with the substance. Nearly €2 trillion of spending is now to be carved up according to national recovery-style plans, in the mould of the post-Covid Recovery and Resilience Facility. That mechanism, for all its supposed flexibility, was effectively a top-down exercise: national governments drafted plans in consultation with Brussels, which in turn approved or rejected them behind closed doors. The European Parliament, regional authorities, and even some commissioners were reduced to bystanders.
Now, this same model is to become the default. Traditional cohesion and agriculture funds—among the few EU mechanisms with a track record of transparency and regional engagement—are being folded into this new centralised approach. The idea is that national governments will spend “more strategically”. In practice, it means fewer controls, more pork-barrel politics, and a decisive shift away from the one area where the EU once made a tangible difference to people’s lives: regional development.
This is not just speculation. Fourteen member states have already signed a joint letter opposing the overhaul, pointing out—correctly—that merging cohesion into opaque national spending plans undermines the very principles of equal development across the Union. Socialist MEPs, usually the first to defend Brussels’ every whim, are warning that the Commission risks hollowing out its own legitimacy. Even inside the Commission itself, at least six commissioners have broken ranks to oppose von der Leyen’s proposal—hardly a sign of consensus.
And then there’s the financing. Brussels insists that no member state will have to pay more. How? By introducing yet more “own resources”—a euphemism for EU-level taxes. Carbon border tariffs. Electronic waste levies. A share of the EU Emissions Trading System. Tobacco duties. The list grows ever longer. Yet it is still not enough to cover the estimated €420 billion shortfall created by repayment obligations on EU borrowing. The maths, as several outlets have understatedly put it, simply does not add up.
What no other media outlet dares to say out loud is that this entire budget is built on a lie. The EU is addicted to debt-financed spending it cannot control and will not admit. It has no army, no borders, no real enforcement capability—yet it is diverting billions into “strategic autonomy”, defence subsidies, and space policy as if it were a nation-state. Meanwhile, vital policy areas like agriculture and regional cohesion are being gutted to free up funds for this fantasy of federal sovereignty.
The Irish are rightly furious at a 22% cut to the CAP. Eastern European countries see their cohesion payments drying up just as Brussels demands they adopt green targets written in glass towers hundreds of miles away. Southern states are being bribed into silence with the promise of national control over new funds. Germany, faced with a court-imposed spending cap at home, has rejected the plan outright.
And yet the Commission ploughs on. Ursula von der Leyen—unelected by the public, yet perhaps the most powerful woman in Europe—announces her budget with the self-satisfaction of someone entirely insulated from democratic feedback. There was apparently no press conference. No Q&A. Barely even a draft to scrutinise. The document appeared on a summer Tuesday as though it were merely the weather report—final, unchangeable, beyond critique.
It is telling that so much media coverage has focused not on the implications of this budget, but on the theatrics around its unveiling. Who was briefed when? Which factions are jostling for influence? How will this affect von der Leyen’s bid for a second term? This is Brussels politics as soap opera—obsessed with court intrigue while ignoring the storm gathering outside the palace walls.
For all the talk of “democratic backsliding” in Hungary or Poland, one might ask whether the real danger lies closer to home. A technocratic elite, answerable to no electorate, consolidating power through budgetary sleight of hand, centralising control in the name of efficiency, and stifling dissent with bureaucratic procedure. If any national government behaved this way, Brussels would sanction it. But when Brussels itself does it, the European media calls it strategy.
What should have happened was simple. The Commission ought to have presented a clear, transparent, and publicly debated proposal—one that strengthened, rather than weakened, regional autonomy. Any shift in spending philosophy should have been openly voted on in the European Parliament and ratified by member state parliaments. Instead, taxpayers get a fait accompli: a €2 trillion blueprint drawn up behind closed doors and draped in empty rhetoric about “strategic alignment” and “resilience”.
Europe deserves better. Citizens across the continent are not clamouring for more centralisation, more debt, or more bureaucratic abstraction. They want tangible improvements: better infrastructure, fairer farming rules, targeted innovation funding, and local accountability. What they are being offered instead is a budget written for the EU’s self-image, not its people.
The real scandal of this week is not that Ursula von der Leyen bungled her rollout, or that the math is fuzzy. It is that no one in Brussels felt that this needed to be democratic in the first place. That tells you everything you need to know about the future they have in mind.
