Brussels: The Competitiveness Fund that the European Commission wants at the heart of its next long-term budget would pool 234 billion euros to back the strategic technologies Europe fears it is losing to the United States and China.
The Commission proposed the European Competitiveness Fund on 16 July 2025, presenting it as the financial engine of the bloc’s economic revival. Combined with Horizon Europe, which carries around 175 billion euros, the package reaches roughly 409 billion euros, or about a fifth of the future EU budget. The Commission details the design on its European Competitiveness Fund page.
The fund’s promise is simplicity. It folds 14 existing programmes into one rulebook and one application gateway, so a company or research consortium no longer has to navigate a maze of separate calls to secure European money. Commission officials argue that fragmentation, more than any shortage of cash, has held back European innovators who watch faster rivals raise money abroad.
Brussels has split the money into four policy windows. Clean transition and industrial decarbonisation take 26.2 billion euros, health, biotech, agriculture and bioeconomy take 20.4 billion, digital leadership takes 51.5 billion, and resilience, security, defence, industry and space claim the largest slice at 125.2 billion.
That last figure signals how sharply priorities have shifted. A budget that once leaned toward cohesion and farming now steers its biggest single pot toward defence and security, mirroring a continent rearming amid war on its eastern flank and doubts about American protection.
Mario Draghi’s landmark report drives the whole design. The former ECB president warned that Europe risks a slow decline unless it invests at scale and deepens its single market, and the Commission built its competitiveness agenda directly on that analysis.
The Commission is targeting 2028 to complete the single market that the fund is meant to serve, betting that cheaper cross-border trade and pooled investment will let European firms scale up the way American rivals routinely do.
Critics question whether one fund can reverse years of underinvestment, and several capitals worry that centralising so much money in Brussels weakens national control. Businesses, meanwhile, welcome the single gateway but want guarantees that the cash reaches industry rather than bureaucracy, and small firms fear the largest grants will flow to incumbents that already dominate their markets.
The Competitiveness Fund now heads into hard bargaining with the Parliament and member states, and the final size and shape will signal how serious the EU is about matching its ambitions with money.
