Leaders eye deep EU budget cuts, while long-term joint borrowing becomes the new normal

Last Saturday, the Irish presidency of the EU proposed cutting nearly €160bn from the EU’s next seven-year budget against the European Commission’s proposal , a bid to bring the wealthiest, frugal member states on board. The deepest cuts fall on competitiveness (€75bn), external action (almost €38bn) and the EU’s administration costs (€10bn).

The Irish text, known in Brussels as the negobox , keeps all three of the commission’s borrowing programmes that sit outside the budget’s normal limits: Catalyst Europe, a €150bn lending facility; a crisis mechanism of up to €395bn for major unforeseen shocks; and support for Ukraine of up to €100bn.

Add loans for defence and lending to other non-EU countries and, by our estimates, joint borrowing could still equal around 44 per cent of the new budget, about €800bn at current prices, up from 41 per cent under the Commission’s proposal. The budget shrinks, but the borrowing hardly changes.

Ireland’s proposed budget is too small for Europe’s mounting common challenges, and its borrowing approach is too ad hoc and risky.

Excluding the distorting effects of NextGenerationEU (NGEU), the Covid recovery fund, the Commission’s budget proposal is already far smaller than the headline figures suggest, and Ireland’s proposal would make it smaller still.

That matters because, as the Draghi report argued, Europe’s shared challenges such as Ukraine, rearmament and competitiveness require European public goods because no single member state captures their full benefits.

A budget worth just over one percent of the EU’s gross national income (GNI) is a poor match for that responsibility.

By comparison, total government expenditure across EU countries comes to close to half of their combined GNI. Keeping most fiscal capacity at national level, while expecting such a modest EU budget to finance increasingly vital continental priorities, is a bad use of public resources.

A stronger common budget needs more of its own revenue, at least what the Commission proposes in its Own Resources Decision , which Parliament broadly supports and which would raise nearly €60bn extra a year.

The Irish plan’s acceptance of five new resources is encouraging. But it has to survive the negotiations, and the details of the final reform will decide whether it means anything.

The Council’s approach to common borrowing remains haphazard, lacking a permanent framework and relying on crisis-driven compromises. Governments may not like it, but a more European approach is coming, and the €800bn is likely to grow.

Support for Kyiv, to be provided outside budget ceilings via the Ukraine Reserve and policy loans, is capped at €100bn for the whole period. This is already looking tight given the accelerating rate of disbursements to Ukraine seen in recent years .

And a successor to SAFE, the EU’s defence loan scheme, is widely expected , since €150bn has proved far from enough for Europe’s rearmament.

France has just shown what it costs to borrow alone. Its yields recently hit a 24-year high , and the state now pays more to borrow than some major French companies. Sharing the effort through the common budget, including prudent joint borrowing, would help spread that risk.

Yet Europe has no clear, sustainable plan for borrowing. To date, EU governments have reluctantly signed up to each new borrowing instrument and called it an exception.

European borrowing capacity has been assembled one crisis at a time, starting with the euro area crisis and accelerating since the pandemic.

NGEU was accepted by fiscally cautious states as a one-off decision to deal with the Covid-19 emergency. Then the war in Ukraine and the need to fund rearmament produced new exceptions.

This year, EU governments used enhanced cooperation, a procedure that lets a subset of member states go ahead without the rest, to approve the €90bn Ukraine Support Loan , the EU’s largest foreign loan ever.

For defence, they reached for Article 122, the treaties’ emergency clause, to set up SAFE . Parliament, which felt sidelined, decided to sue the Council before the European Court of Justice.

These exceptional programmes are guaranteed by the so-called budget headroom, the margin between the EU’s revenue ceiling and the spending limits in the seven-year budget, rather than by money set aside in advance.

In barely five years, headroom-backed exposure has climbed to €681bn (see Figure 1), 82 percent of all EU debt.

The European Court of Auditors has warned that if a Ukraine loan guaranteed this way goes bad, future EU budgets, and the national contributions that fund them, would have to cover the loss.

EU capitals remain divided over the new budget and over joint borrowing. Net contributors, sometimes referred to as the Frugal Six , want deep cuts in the commission’s proposal, argue that new common borrowing is not the solution and have misgivings about the creation of new own resources.

By contrast, a group of sixteen southern and eastern countries, that call themselves the " Friends of Cohesion ”, are much more open to joint borrowing and back an approach closer to the Commission and Parliament on the budget and own resources.

Ireland’s plan largely reflects the influence of the frugal countries, yet one diplomat has already dismissed it as “ not even close to a landing zone .”

Europe needs an ambitious budget, backed by at least the Commission’s proposed new own resources, so it relies less on national contributions based on GNI. Joint borrowing should become a permanent, predictable part of it, with safeguards.

First, it should fund loans, not grants, as the Commission suggests. Second, riskier exposures, especially to non-EU countries, should be at least partly backed by money set aside in advance, as the Court of Auditors recommends.

Where it makes sense, the headroom guarantee could be topped up with national guarantees in proportion to each country’s size, as under SURE, and like-minded partners outside the EU could sometimes take part.

Stronger capital at institutions such as the EIB, or at any future defence-financing vehicle, would also let Europe borrow more together without putting its creditworthiness at risk.

Governments should also consider deferring repayment of the NGEU bonds, as the Draghi report suggested, especially if the own-resources reform falls short. It would protect priority spending when it is needed most.

Sustained joint borrowing brings a bonus: more common safe assets in euros, which strengthens the euro’s international role. The demand is already there.

Last month Piotr Serafin, the EU's budget commissioner, flew to Seoul and Tokyo to meet investors. Asian buyers’ share of EU bond syndications has risen from 5 per cent to 9 per cent in the second half of 2025.

Wobbles in US bond markets, which partly reflect doubts about America’s fiscal health, its reliability as a partner and the dollar’s safe-haven status, give the euro an opening.

But it can only take it if EU governments put their own fiscal houses in order.

Ongoing tensions in the French bond market provide a clear warning. Putting France’s finances on a sustainable path would do more than reassure markets about the euro. It would restore French debt as a safe euro asset .

EU leaders meet on Thursday and Friday in Brussels. Whatever they discuss (and later decide) on the budget, Europe should keep borrowing together, and in large amounts.

The task now is to give that borrowing a coherent plan: a permanent framework, money set aside in advance and safeguards that cautious capitals can accept.

Dora Meredith is the Director of ODI Europe, a Brussels-based global affairs think tank part of the ODI Global network.

Heliodoro Temprano Arroyo is a senior research Associate for ODI Europe and previously held managerial and advisory roles in the European Commission’s directorate-general for economic and financial affairs.