In the so-called negotiating box, Spain, like the rest of the member states, aims to receive a real-terms amount equivalent to what it received in 2021-2027. The direct subsidies for agriculture under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are guaranteed, as are those for the less prosperous regions (below 75% of the European per-capita GDP average); in our case, Extremadura, Andalusia, and Castilla-La Mancha.
What has mobilized the agribusiness sector is that the other pillar of the CAP, nominally for rural development (the former FEADER), but which actually goes 95% toward agricultural development as well, would no longer be guaranteed from Brussels and would have to be negotiated with the Treasury. The same applies to the allocation of territorial cohesion funds across the other autonomous communities, given that they exceed the aforementioned 75% of average income. There is also concern that the current 8% reserve of the European Regional Development Fund for urban development (in Spain, EDUSI-EDIL) is not guaranteed and, above all, that Rural Development Groups would be left in limbo, since the 5% of FEADER would no longer be assured.
“During the Christmas holidays, von der Leyen guaranteed by letter that 10% of the envelope received by the member states would be allocated to rural areas”
With a Commission so political, the situation did not take long to find its direction: during Christmas, von der Leyen guaranteed by letter that 10% of the envelope would go to rural areas. For its part, the Parliament — which has already presented a draft of its negotiating position, pending the vote on 6,000 amendments — guarantees that 5%, 11% for the cities, and that, whatever happens with the rest of the funds, the CAP be approved separately, as its powerful sector demands.
Therefore, beyond the Cypriot presidency of the Council being openly from the Cohesion Friends group, and the upcoming Irish presidency clearly favorable to strengthening the CAP, while the self-styled frugals (i.e., the rich and/or Protestants) insist — as they have done four times in the last twenty-five years — on devoting more funds to competitiveness (now cloaked in geopolitical protectionism and dual-use civil-military technology), the most likely outcome is that the spending framework designed by the circle closest to von der Leyen will come out roughly as proposed a year ago.
All this, provided that the member states agree on the revenue side: the president’s proposal has been calibrated to please the ministries of Finance and the sectoral and national lobbies most powerful. The balance between statu quo — with Cohesion and CAP maintaining substantial figures, albeit with a smaller relative weight compared to the new European Fund for Competitiveness — rests on the assumption that the member states will accept expanding their own resources, i.e., granting the Union the capacity to levy “European taxes”.
Without that clearly federalizing step, the budget as proposed collapses. And with it, the hard bargain of von der Leyen, who has presented a budget that quite satisfies many, especially governments: instead of a panoply of funds, they would receive a single envelope, the National (and Regional) Cooperation Plan (CNR Plans or NRPP in English), governed by new regulations deliberately sparse in detail to grant greater autonomy to central governments… in exchange for allowing the Commission to manage directly the “big bazooka,” the European Fund for Competitiveness, which would provide rapid availability of about 25% of the EU budget, compared with 4% available at the outset of the covid crisis.
“We run a high risk —due to Spain’s weak intergovernmental culture— that the design of the new European funds will have as collateral damage the economic constitution of the autonomous state”
While all these dynamics are significant, they are not what, in Spanish terms, should worry us most. We run a high risk — due to Spain’s weak intergovernmental culture — that the design of the new European funds will have as collateral damage the economic constitution of the autonomous state.
The CNR Plans, which in some ways mirror United Nations country programs and reinforce the intergovernmental logic, are direct heirs of the Recovery Plan launched with the covid crisis, whose spending formally ends this month. Although there were precedents of centralized management (Plan for Structural Reforms, to some extent the Just Transition Fund or the old Cohesion Fund and its de facto successor, the so-called pluriregional programs), the CNRs are direct heirs of that post-COVID plan.
For the first time, all ministries had access to the Recovery Plan of European funds to execute priorities long left on the drawing board. The Treasury managed to push the argument — debatable — that that plan should be managed in a centralized manner, even though many investments were indistinguishable from those of traditional EU funds. Still, the management was more territorialized (around 50%) than in formally federal states, due to limitations of central administrative capacity (doubling the funds, the same number of officials) and due to parliamentary arithmetic in the Cortes.
And yet, as will be remembered, there were unedifying episodes at the Conference of Presidents — in one of them, with von der Leyen present — and at sectoral conferences. For example, politically disparate regions such as Galicia and the Basque Country claimed for themselves a quarter of all funds allocated to Spain.
With the new CNRs we face a revised and expanded version of this drift. In a system like Spain, already characterized by low-quality intergovernmental coordination, the new logic would now also apply to traditional funds, hitting the autonomous architecture directly.
After insistence — partly due to pressure from the German Länder —, von der Leyen has proposed in another letter that these plans could include chapters analogous to regional operational programs and a nebulous “direct dialogue with the regions”.
“Cohesion policy and political autonomy have gone hand in hand for four decades”
However, the vast majority of the non-tied investment capacity of the autonomous communities comes from the European funds. Cohesion policy and political autonomy have gone hand in hand for four decades. If now the balance tilts decisively toward the ministries in Madrid, not only would the regions lose their main space for their own economic policy, but the central government, regardless of who is in power, would come to direct regional investments even in areas within their competence, turning political autonomies into mere management desks.
This is not a hypothesis: FEADER has already happened, which in the current period stopped having regional programs and whose decisive weight lies with the Ministry of Agriculture in the CAP Strategic Plan, the other immediate precedent of the new CNR Plan. Thus, it is impossible to know precisely the expenditure by region in this area, unlike cohesion funds. This break in territorial autonomy hardly provoked opposition six years ago, due to fear of mobilizing the agricultural sector. Even the Länder in Germany, traditionally protective of their autonomy, did not oppose then.
That is not the case now: the Länder have reacted strongly, understanding that extending that scheme to all funds implies a structural cut. The Committee of the Regions has also adopted an unusually hard position (for Brussels), now supported by the European Parliament against von der Leyen’s initial plans. The Bundesrat has sent an opinion to Brussels expressing its concern. In response, the equivalent document from the Spanish Congress’s legal drafters considers everything formally lawful.
Nevertheless, not only representatives of the main opposition party have shown renewed autonomist sensitivity, but even socialist presidents —such as those of Navarra and Castilla-La Mancha— have signed the Galicia Declaration alerting about the centralizing drift.
It is not just a fear that precedents may repeat themselves. Two weeks ago, the Government presented the Climate Social Plan, tied to a new European fund with 9,000 million euros for Spain, another innovation from von der Leyen that is to be launched in 2026 and has scarcely been discussed. Its governance is currently reduced to an email address for the autonomous communities, and the central government still has to define it once the Commission approves the plan. All this in clearly autonomous domains such as mobility, housing, or energy poverty.
We are thus at a turning point. Given the modest and not very innovative execution of funds by the autonomous communities — simply observe the scant ambition of the current operating programs, recently revised without debate — one could justify the idea of building at the central level a strategic state capacity that eliminates existing silos and enables funding of multidimensional policies, such as the new Demographic Challenge Strategy. It is also logical that the Commission wants to free itself from managing a panoply of funds, provided that, as the Letta report suggests, it can strengthen its capacity to push structural reforms more effectively than it did in the Recovery Plan. Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that renewed ambition will occur either in Madrid or in Brussels.
“It is logical that the Commission wants to free itself from managing a panoply of funds, as long as it can strengthen its ability to push structural reforms”
However, in the preliminary consultations for this article, politicians of various stripes — more concerned about elections and the numerous legal cases — did not show significant concern. Whoever governs in 2027, it will be too late: senior officials will already have been drafting for a year, in the euphemistically named “informal dialogue” with the Commission, the new CNR Plan.
Meanwhile, the investiture partners, so responsive to gestures and concessions from the government, have not demanded guarantees about respecting the autonomous state. Nor has the rest of the political spectrum demanded that the priorities of the new Plan be defined in Parliament, which will contain the main sources of public investment for the next two legislatures.
Nor is there anxiety among Commission officials or among regional fund managers. It is natural: they will continue managing resources. But, under the pretext of power-balancing in Brussels, we risk losing, almost without realizing it, the real political capacity of the autonomous communities.
