Two of the European Union’s most politically visible spending programmes moved decisively into trilogue territory this month, with the Culture and Sport Council adopting back-to-back partial mandates on AgoraEU and on the successor Erasmus+ regulation for the 2028 to 2034 financing period. The Erasmus+ position was signed off on 11 May 2026, the AgoraEU partial general approach on 12 May, and the legal effect is that Member States have agreed how to negotiate on every substantive element of the two files except the figures themselves, which remain hostage to the broader multiannual financial framework talks.
Both files carry headline funding numbers that, taken at face value, would represent the most significant uplift in the soft-power side of the Union budget in a decade. The Commission proposed €40.8 billion for Erasmus+ over the seven-year period, a roughly 56 per cent uplift on the current €26.2 billion envelope, and €8.58 billion for AgoraEU, broadly doubling the combined Creative Europe and CERV envelopes. Whether either survives the MFF negotiation at proposed strength is the unknown that hangs over both texts.
The substantive Council positions repay close reading. On Erasmus+, ministers strengthened the inclusion architecture, requiring national agencies to maintain explicit targets for participants from disadvantaged backgrounds and to publish disaggregated data on uptake. The vocational and adult learning strands gained ground at the expense of pure higher-education mobility, reflecting a deliberate alignment with the Union of Skills agenda and the Draghi-era productivity argument that European workforce upskilling is the binding constraint on the bloc’s competitiveness. Sport and youth strands were preserved largely as proposed, with a small new line on grassroots democratic participation built into the youth pillar.
AgoraEU is the more politically charged file. Bringing together Creative Europe, Citizens Equality Rights and Values, and the audiovisual and news media strand of the European Media Freedom Act into a single architecture was always going to provoke a fight, and the partial mandate shows the seams. Ministers inserted a new AgoraEU Committee composed of Member State representatives, empowered to vote on concrete implementation issues across each strand. The Commission had resisted this in earlier drafts, treating it as comitology that would slow disbursement. Council won that round, and the Parliament will now have to decide whether to push back or accept the trade-off in exchange for tighter conditionality on rule-of-law performance.
The funding split inside AgoraEU is also instructive. The proposed €1.8 billion Creative Europe culture strand is the smallest of the three pillars, behind €3.2 billion for Media+ and €3.6 billion for Democracy and Civic Engagement. Culture organisations have been vocal in arguing the proportions invert the Union’s own narrative about cultural diversity as core infrastructure, and Council’s mandate gives them a foothold by inserting language on minimum allocation thresholds. Media+ retains a dedicated audiovisual co-production stream and explicit protection for cross-border investigative journalism funding, signalling that the press freedom debate of 2024 to 2025 has hardened into ministerial consensus.
The Parliament side of both files is being prepared in the Culture and Education and Budgets committees in parallel, with rapporteurs targeting plenary positions before the summer break to give trilogues a runway. The realistic timetable points to political agreement in the autumn presidency, technical finalisation by early 2027, and adoption ahead of the MFF lock. For now, the message from this month’s Council is that the programmatic ambition for the next cycle is unusually coherent across capitals. Whether the money follows is a separate negotiation entirely, and one in which culture and education ministers will not hold the pen.
