The Ledger and the Ward

The European Union cannot adopt its long-term budget without the unanimous agreement of all twenty-seven governments, followed by the consent of the European Parliament. That is the governing provision. This Thursday, EU leaders meet under it to settle a framework of nearly two trillion euros for 2028 to 2034, and any one of them can withhold the final signature. They are hurrying because the Christmas deadline is close, and because elections, above all in France, may strengthen the parties that would prefer the Union to have less money or none.

The hurry is understandable. I think it is aimed at the wrong place.

The strongest argument for speed deserves a fair hearing. A deal signed before the political weather turns fixes the totals for seven years. A eurosceptic government elected later would find the money already appropriated and the treaty requiring unanimity to reopen it. On this view, Christmas is a fortress wall, and every week of delay is a week in which the wall is unfinished. Reasonable diplomats hold this view, and they are not foolish to hold it.

But look at what the wall encloses. The Commission’s proposal does not only set a total. It folds much of the old agricultural and cohesion money, which has historically made up most of what the Union actually spends, into single national and regional partnership plans. Each government would write its own plan and negotiate it with Brussels. In practice, the question of which valley gets the irrigation channel, which town gets the rail spur, and which smallholder keeps a direct payment moves from the council chamber to the ministries of each capital. The leaders can agree on Thursday how large the pot will be. Whoever holds those ministries in 2028, 2030 and 2033 will decide what it is for.

France votes for its president in 2027. The budget begins in 2028. A deal reached at Christmas to outrun French eurosceptics would therefore hand the French spending plan, a very large share of the whole, to whichever government those voters choose. The fortress has a gate, and the leaders are building it themselves and leaving the key on a hook outside.

I have watched this pattern on a smaller scale more times than I can count. A city council votes an appropriation for sanitation and feels it has done its work. The money then passes through a ward office, and the ward office decides which alleys are cleaned. The appropriation was real. The clean alley was hypothetical. Anyone who wanted to know whether the reform had worked had to walk the alley, not read the ordinance. The appropriation is the easy part to celebrate. The ward office is where the work succeeds or fails, and it attracts no ceremony.

There is a dry comedy in the present arrangement, and the comedy shows something true. Twenty-seven heads of government will sit through the night arguing over decimal places in a total that none of them will spend. When the session ends they will hold press conferences in which each one claims to have won, and each will be correct, because they will have been arguing about different things. One will have protected the farm envelope, another will have held the ceiling down, and a third will have kept rule-of-law conditions alive in some form. The people who will actually discover what was agreed are not in the room. They are the farmers who drove tractors into Brussels last winter because they suspected, quite accurately, that their payments were being moved into a document they would never see, and the regional officials who will spend 2028 trying to work out which national ministry now answers their letters.

If the leaders want protection against a later government hostile to the Union, the place to build it is not the calendar. It is the plan rules. The regulation should require each national plan to be drawn up with published consultation of the regions and the farm organisations it affects. It should set ring-fenced minimums that a new minister cannot redraw by decree. It should require mid-term reporting to the European Parliament in terms a mayor can check against what arrived in their town. These provisions are dull, and they are the only part of Thursday’s work that will still be operating when the political weather changes.

A Christmas deal that settles the sum and leaves the spending to chance is like a family signing the lease on a larger flat without asking who will live in which room. The landlord will be satisfied and the papers will be in order. Then, sometime in 2028, someone will stand in a doorway in a ministry in Paris, holding a pen, and decide who sleeps in the hall.