“The regional dimension is not completely lost” from the draft budget, said an EU official who, like others quoted in this article, was granted anonymity to speak freely.
Von der Leyen’s decision is a climbdown from her initial plan to significantly increase the power of central governments in managing the EU’s regional funds that are currently worth €400 billion and make up one-third of the bloc’s total spending.
The idea was that empowering national capitals would act as an incentive to complete reforms and reduce red tape. However, critics said that it would have just reinforced existing disparities within individual countries, sidelining regions from the process.
Lingering suspicions
The whole issue is something of a hot-button topic for the EU. Boosting individual regions within countries has played a key role ever since the so-called cohesion policy was introduced in the 1970s to narrow the gap between poorer and richer areas in Europe.
Critics welcomed von der Leyen’s concessions, but they have lingering suspicions that this is little more than politics.
“They are making only minimal concessions, but their initial ideas were so unpopular that they had to give in,” said Siegfried Mureșan, the Parliament’s budget negotiator for von der Leyen’s own center-right European People’s Party.
