EU leaders race to secure two trillion euro budget deal

The Lease Signed Before the Owner Returns

Every participant in this debate accepts that the deal must be done before the voters speak. None has asked when this became obvious, or who profits from the consensus. The assumption is the story.

Consider how the matter is framed. EU leaders are racing, on a Thursday, to settle a budget of nearly two trillion euros covering 2028 to 2034, and the danger named in every briefing is that the Christmas deadline will slip into a season of elections, above all in France, where eurosceptic forces may grow strong enough to derail the negotiation. Read the sentence again, slowly. The election is cast as the hazard and the deadline as the shelter. A seven-year commitment of public wealth is to be fixed in place precisely so that the public, at its next opportunity to speak, will find the matter already closed. This is presented not as a political choice but as prudence, as weather to be outrun.

The strongest defence of this arrangement deserves a fair hearing, because it is a serious one. A multiannual budget exists so that a farmer in the Beauce or a regional council in Andalusia can plan beyond the next ballot. Investment in railways and research cannot be renegotiated every time a government falls. A Union whose finances lurched with each national election would be governed by its least stable member. On this view, insulating the budget from electoral weather is no theft from democracy but the precondition of any durable common project.

I grant all of it, and it changes nothing about the mechanism. Stability is not the issue; the question is how stability is purchased. A ruling arrangement that is truly hegemonic does not need to hurry. Its settlements are carried forward by consent, because the governed recognise their own interests in them. When the leaders of a political order must sprint to sign before the electorate arrives, they have quietly confessed that consent can no longer be assumed, only anticipated and pre-empted. Their haste does not show strength. It shows a coalition that has begun to govern by timing rather than by persuasion, and timing is what remains of a hegemony once its arguments have stopped working.

Imagine a household in which the tenants, nervous that the owner is coming home and may disapprove of the furnishings, rush to sign a seven-year lease on his behalf the night before his train arrives. They are not wicked. They may sincerely believe the arrangement is in his interest. But when he walks through the door and finds the papers already stamped, he will draw a conclusion about who the house belongs to. The eurosceptic parties so feared in Paris are not the cause of this conclusion. They are its beneficiaries. Each deal sealed in order to escape the vote becomes, for them, a grievance ready-made. The rush to forestall the eurosceptics turns out to be one of their most reliable sources of recruitment.

Here is the crack. The pro-European consensus describes itself as the defender of democracy against populism, yet its most decisive act of the decade is organised around keeping a democratic moment from touching it. That contradiction cannot be explained away in a press conference, because people feel it before they can name it. And the parties who name it most loudly offer nothing in its place but a return to national walls, the kind of sickly symptom that appears when an old settlement loses its persuasive force and no new one has learned to speak.

Who, then, does the intellectual work for those caught in the middle? Not the finance ministers, whose expertise is real but whose task is closure. Not the commentators, who report the deadline as if it were a law of nature. The organic intellectuals of a different European common sense would be those who insist that a two-trillion-euro budget is a programme for a society, something that can be argued for in public and survive a vote, rather than a sum to be locked away from one. They exist, scattered among trade unionists, regional mayors and farmers’ associations. What they lack is not ideas but a stage, because the timetable has been arranged so that no stage is open.

Somewhere in the Europa building tonight a junior official will print the latest revision of the negotiating box, staple it, and lay it on a table before leaders who have not slept. She will notice, perhaps, that the document runs to 2034, and that no one in the room was elected to see it through. Then she will turn off the light, because Christmas is coming.