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August 29, 2026

Newsletter

The European Post

Policy • Diplomacy • strategic insight

LATEST
Thailand Trade Talks Enter Their Final Nine Chapters in EuropeWhy Europe’s Agri-Food Surplus Grew While Exports Kept FallingWhat Europe Needs From the GCC Summit Riyadh Will Host in AutumnHolding Limits Still Block a Digital Euro Deal Before DecemberData Rules Agreed With Seoul Now Wait on Parliament’s ConsentChina Listed Fourteen European Firms and November Ends the TruceWhy Australia’s Finished Trade Deal Still Has No Signature DateLate Application Leaves Tokyo Outside the Defence Loan QueueCyber Resilience Rules Give Makers 24 Hours From SeptemberWinter Stocks Test Europe’s New Gas Storage Flexibility RulesInnovation Theory Meets Merger Control in a New Commission StudyMercosur Tariffs Fell in May and the Court Has Not Ruled YetBilaterals III Now Turns on Which Referendum Switzerland PicksDark Patterns Face the EU Digital Fairness ActFifteen Chapters Stand Between Montenegro and 2028Who Blinks First in the FP10 Research Budget FightCustoms Reform Landed in March and Its Data Hub Opens in 2028Victims Rights Gain an EU Helpline and Capitals Have Two YearsIreland Must Move the EU Budget Box Before the October SummitFertiliser Prices Sit 71 Percent Above Their 2024 Average LevelThailand Trade Talks Enter Their Final Nine Chapters in EuropeWhy Europe’s Agri-Food Surplus Grew While Exports Kept FallingWhat Europe Needs From the GCC Summit Riyadh Will Host in AutumnHolding Limits Still Block a Digital Euro Deal Before DecemberData Rules Agreed With Seoul Now Wait on Parliament’s ConsentChina Listed Fourteen European Firms and November Ends the TruceWhy Australia’s Finished Trade Deal Still Has No Signature DateLate Application Leaves Tokyo Outside the Defence Loan QueueCyber Resilience Rules Give Makers 24 Hours From SeptemberWinter Stocks Test Europe’s New Gas Storage Flexibility RulesInnovation Theory Meets Merger Control in a New Commission StudyMercosur Tariffs Fell in May and the Court Has Not Ruled YetBilaterals III Now Turns on Which Referendum Switzerland PicksDark Patterns Face the EU Digital Fairness ActFifteen Chapters Stand Between Montenegro and 2028Who Blinks First in the FP10 Research Budget FightCustoms Reform Landed in March and Its Data Hub Opens in 2028Victims Rights Gain an EU Helpline and Capitals Have Two YearsIreland Must Move the EU Budget Box Before the October SummitFertiliser Prices Sit 71 Percent Above Their 2024 Average Level

Rights Groups Fear Their Core Funding Vanishes Inside AgoraEU

Christian Torp
Directive Tracker, Social Affairs and Employment

Sofia: A small Bulgarian organisation that runs legal advice for Roma families does not employ a fundraiser. It employs three lawyers and a coordinator, and it survives on an operating grant that pays for the coordinator. That grant category is the one civil society networks now believe is disappearing.

The Commission’s proposal for the 2028-2034 budget creates AgoraEU, a single programme merging Creative Europe and the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme. It carries three strands: Creative Europe Culture, Media+, and a democracy strand containing what is currently CERV. The headline number is €8.6 billion, against €3.94 billion for the two existing programmes combined.

Doubling looks generous. Recipients read the structure rather than the total. Merging two programmes into one budget line means the strands compete internally, and the competition will be arbitrated by whoever writes the annual work programme. Culture and media have organised industry advocates. Small rights organisations in smaller member states do not.

The sharper objection concerns grant type. Project grants fund a defined activity for a defined period. Operating grants fund an organisation’s existence, which is what allows it to keep staff between projects and to speak publicly without a funder’s permission. Civil society groups reading the AgoraEU proposal say structural support for EU-wide networks largely vanishes from it.

Thirty-two networks, claiming to represent more than 2,800 organisations, wrote to the Council opposing a proposed €300 million cut and calling for €10.72 billion instead. The joint letter makes an argument about capacity rather than generosity. Organisations that cannot pay a coordinator cannot apply for project grants, which means money notionally available to them stays unspent.

Governance is the second complaint. The proposal contains little machinery for involving civil society in designing or managing the programme meant to sustain civil society. That gap matters more than it sounds. Work programme priorities determine which calls exist, and calls determine which organisations survive. Groups excluded from that conversation end up applying for money shaped around somebody else’s assumptions.

Meanwhile the current programme keeps running. The 2026 calls are live on the funding portal, covering citizens’ engagement, networks of towns, European remembrance, the Daphne strand on violence against women, and Union values. The gender equality call closed in April. Others follow through the autumn, and successful applicants will be delivering projects well into the period when AgoraEU is supposed to take over.

That overlap creates a practical risk nobody has solved. A project starting in 2027 under CERV rules may need a follow-on grant under AgoraEU rules that have not been written. Organisations plan two and three years ahead. They are being asked to plan across a legal discontinuity.

Parliament will take a position, and Parliament has historically defended civil society funding more robustly than the Council. But the budget negotiation is a package, and the democracy strand of a merged culture programme is not the file on which member states will spend their political capital. Agriculture and cohesion will absorb that.

The Bulgarian lawyers will keep working either way. Whether they keep a coordinator depends on a line in an annex that most negotiators will never read closely.

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