Naples: Europe is asking its regions a blunt question before it rewrites the rules on how hundreds of billions of euros are spent. The Commission has opened a call for evidence feeding the tenth Cohesion Report, and it wants mayors, regional presidents, businesses and ordinary citizens to say what has worked and what has failed before the next long-term budget locks in a new design for cohesion funds.

The timing is deliberate. A mid-term review has just reshuffled nearly a tenth of the 2021 to 2027 envelope, steering money toward defence, housing, water resilience and critical technologies. That reshuffle exposed a tension the report must confront. Cohesion policy exists to narrow the gap between rich and poor regions, yet it is increasingly asked to bankroll whatever crisis dominates the headlines.

Southern Italy sits at the heart of that argument. Regions like Campania have absorbed cohesion money for decades, and their leaders bristle at proposals that would route future funding through national governments rather than regional authorities. They fear a centralising drift would let capitals capture money meant for the places furthest from the centre.

The Commission insists it is listening. Anyone can file views through the Have Your Say portal until 11 August, and officials promise the responses will shape both the report and the design of the post-2027 framework. Regional networks are mobilising members to flood the consultation, aware that silence now could cost them influence later.

What hangs in the balance is more than money. Cohesion policy has been one of the Union’s most visible presences in daily life, funding the ring road, the hospital wing and the retrained worker in places that rarely feel Brussels doing anything for them. Strip out the regional partners who deliver those projects, critics warn, and the policy loses the local knowledge that made it work.

Supporters of reform answer that the current system is slow and tangled, with money sitting unspent while regions wrestle paperwork. They want simpler rules, faster payments and sharper links to results. The mid-term review already handed reprogramming regions higher co-financing and more up-front cash to speed things along.

The tenth report will not settle the fight, but it will frame it. When the Commission tables its budget proposals, the regions that spoke loudest now will point to the evidence they supplied. For a city like Naples, still counting on cohesion money to close old gaps, staying quiet is the one option nobody can afford.