The Council’s MFF budget proposal: bad news for AgoraEU
The Cypriot Presidency has released its Negotiating Box on the next long-term EU budget (MFF), which includes proposed budget lines aimed at supporting negotiations on the MFF during upcoming European Council meetings. Unfortunately, the proposed budget allocated for AgoraEU doesn’t make for good reading.
The Council proposes an approximate 2% cut in funding when compared to the European Commission’s initial proposal. As far as the AgoraEU programme is concerned, the Council proposes a budget of €7,295 million (in constant prices), representing a 33% reduction compared to the Parliament’s position – roughly €500 million less every year for our sectors.
The budget envisaged by the Council is woefully insufficient to meet the challenges and demands facing European culture, media, democracy, and civil society.
To put the proposal into perspective, the budget allocated to the Creative Europe – Culture strand under the Commission’s original proposal amounts to roughly €230 million per year (in constant prices), just under the annual budget of a single cultural institution: the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This envelope is squeezed further under the Council’s proposal. A thriving European cultural ecosystem demands far greater funding and ambition than the budget of a single national library.
The European Parliament’s budgetary proposal of €10.72 billion (in constant prices) for AgoraEU is the bare minimum required to sustain the cultural and creative sectors. This must be structurally reinforced by digital fines collected from the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and the AI Act. Beyond the AgoraEU programme, we continue to call for 2% of funding in the next MFF to be allocated towards culture as part of the ongoing Ask, Pay, Trust and Cultural Deal for Europe campaigns.
The coming weeks are pivotal to make clear to national foreign affairs and finance ministers that the AgoraEU funding levels proposed by the Council are entirely unacceptable. More than 550 organisations from the cultural and creative sectors, independent media and journalism, civil society and democracy actors agree in the need for a stronger budget for the AgoraEU programme; if AgoraEU is to be supported to realise its essential cultural, civic and democratic potential, it is vital that it is funded accordingly.
Image source: General Affairs Council – June 2026 – copyright: European Union, 2026.