A partnership without constraint - What the overhaul of the EU's external budget changes in the relationship with Africa

Introduction: three facts from 2026, and the one that counts

Three events of 2026 concern the relationship between the European Union and the African continent. They have received very unequal attention.

On 9 April, the OECD published preliminary official development assistance data for 2025: USD 174.3 billion for all members of the Development Assistance Committee, a fall of 23.1% in real terms year on year, the sharpest annual contraction ever recorded. Bilateral aid to the least developed countries fell by 25.8%, and aid to sub-Saharan Africa by 26.3%1. This information circulated widely.

On 15 June, the Council adopted conclusions confirming Global Gateway as the Union’s worldwide investment strategy, described as combining “development cooperation, trade and investment policy”2. This information circulated within specialist circles.

The third fact is not an event but a calendar. The proposed regulation establishing the Global Europe instrument, presented on 16 July 2025 as part of the 2028-2034 multiannual financial framework, was the subject of a Council negotiating position on 16 June 2026; it is due to be voted on by the European Parliament’s development and foreign affairs committees in September 2026, then in plenary during the first October session, before trilogues open3. This information barely circulated at all.

Yet it is the third that binds the relationship most durably. The fall in aid in 2025 is a cyclical shock, and a largely imported one — the United States alone accounts for roughly three quarters of the decline, its aid having fallen by 56.9%4. A shock of that nature can, in principle, be corrected. The overhaul of the budgetary instrument, by contrast, fixes the legal form of the European commitment for seven years. And that form is changing in nature.

The thesis defended here is easy to state and less comfortable to accept. What the reform removes is not, in the first place, an amount: it is a set of enforceable constraints — quantified thematic targets, geographic floors, a quantified commitment towards the least developed countries — whose function was not merely to steer spending, but to make the policy legible, predictable and contestable, by the European Parliament as much as by partners. At the same time, the discourse of the relationship has shifted towards symmetry: the Luanda summit formalised a long-term strategic partnership between two entities carrying agendas of their own, and the established formula is now the move “from aid to co-investment”. These two movements are concurrent and they contradict one another. The asymmetry has not disappeared; it has changed location. It has left the stated purpose of the policy, where it was visible and open to criticism, to lodge itself in the policy’s procedural form, where it no longer is.

We shall examine first what the 2025 data does and does not allow us to conclude (I), then the architecture of the proposed instrument and what it withdraws (II), then the gap between declared symmetry and instrumented asymmetry (III), before setting out what remains negotiable in the coming months (IV).

I. The shock in volume: what the figures establish

A. The scale and geography of the decline

The preliminary data published by the OECD in April 2026 describes a contraction without precedent in the series. Official development assistance from members of the Development Assistance Committee stood at USD 174.3 billion in 2025, some fifty billion lower in real terms than the previous year. Measured against donors’ combined gross national income, it represents 0.26%, down from 0.34% in 2024. Bilateral aid fell by 26.4%, to USD 126.4 billion; multilateral aid by 12.7%, to USD 47.9 billion5.

The geography of this decline deserves to be noted, because it is not neutral. The fall struck hardest at the most dependent categories: 25.8% for the least developed countries, 26.3% for sub-Saharan Africa — that is, more than the average. In other words, the contraction was not distributed pro rata; it was more severe where aid accounts for the largest share of public resources. In a publication devoted to projections, the OECD anticipates a further 6.9% decline in 2026 and puts the fall in bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa at 11.6% for that same year; sub-Saharan Africa and the least developed countries would then be facing a third consecutive annual drop, returning support to its level of the early 2000s6.

Europe’s part in this movement must be stated without softening. While the American withdrawal explains most of the 2025 shock, European donors contributed to it: the Union’s institutions cut their own aid by 13.8% over the year, and aid from the EU member states that belong to the Development Assistance Committee fell by 9.8% overall7. Germany becomes, for the first time, the largest donor in the world by volume — with USD 29.1 billion — having itself reduced its effort by 17%. France reports USD 14.5 billion, down 11%, or 0.42% of its gross national income, below the trajectory set out in its 2021 programming law; its 2026 finance act records a further reduction of EUR 803 million, with appropriations for the “official development assistance” mission falling from EUR 4.373 billion to EUR 3.569 billion — a fifth consecutive cut8. Becoming the world’s largest donor while reducing one’s effort is not a distinction: it is the description of a field that is emptying out.

B. What the figure does not say

One must guard against a line of reasoning whose limits the critical literature has demonstrated, and which the present period encourages. The correlation between aid volumes and development outcomes is weak and disputed; the challenge to aid effectiveness, mounted from opposing theoretical positions, has serious arguments at its disposal9. Mechanically attributing precise health or security effects to falling disbursements is an inference the available data does not support, and several of the estimates that circulated in the first half of 2026 are openly contested.

What is, by contrast, firmly established and rarely disputed is the effect of volatility. For a ministry of finance, the value of external financing lies not only in its amount but in its programmability: a resource announced across several financial years can be entered in the budget, tied to a spending plan, invoked before creditors. A resource whose amount and allocation can be revised mid-period loses a substantial part of its budgetary usefulness, irrespective of its volume; measuring the cost of that volatility has been the object of dedicated methodological work10. The International Monetary Fund devotes a chapter of its April 2026 regional outlook to the question, under a title — “this time is different” — that bears precisely on the durable, rather than cyclical, character of the current retreat11.

This is the point to carry forward. Public debate has concentrated on the level of aid. The variable that weighs most heavily on partner countries’ public management is not the level but predictability. And that is exactly the variable that the reform of the European instrument shifts.

II. The overhaul of the instrument: what disappears is not an amount

A. The proposed architecture

The proposal of 16 July 2025 consolidates into a single instrument what until now fell under three separate vehicles: the neighbourhood, development and international cooperation instrument, the instrument for pre-accession assistance, and the humanitarian aid instrument — the latter retaining separate governance in order to preserve humanitarian principles.

The amount calls for a methodological note, because two figures are in circulation. The proposal is presented at EUR 200.3 billion over seven years in analyses working in current prices — around 0.14% of the Union’s gross national income, against 0.11% over the 2021-2027 period; the European Parliament’s legislative tracking records EUR 176.83 billion for the same proposal. The gap turns on the price base used. Both are given here rather than silently privileging one12.

The indicative breakdown distinguishes five geographic pillars and one global pillar: Europe (pre-accession and eastern neighbourhood) at EUR 43.17 billion; Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf at EUR 42.93 billion; sub-Saharan Africa at EUR 60.53 billion; Asia-Pacific at EUR 17.05 billion; the Americas and the Caribbean at EUR 9.14 billion; cross-cutting thematic envelopes at EUR 12.68 billion. To these are added, outside the ceilings, a reserve of up to EUR 100 billion in loans for Ukraine, and a cushion for emerging challenges raised to EUR 14.8 billion from EUR 9.53 billion13.

The nominal increase has been given prominence. It calls for three reservations, which it is more honest to state at the outset. It incorporates instruments previously counted separately, which rules out direct comparison. It is not adjusted for inflation anticipated over the period. And the share required to count as official development assistance falls from 93% to 90%, applied to a base from which Ukraine is excluded. The headline figure and the real effort do not coincide.

B. The disappearance of binding targets

The decisive point lies elsewhere, and it is structural rather than budgetary.

The regulation in force for 2021-2027 attaches quantified constraints to spending: 30% devoted to climate action, at least 20% to human development and social inclusion, a minimum of 10% for migration-related matters, and floor amounts by region — at least EUR 29.18 billion for sub-Saharan Africa and at least EUR 19.32 billion for the neighbourhood, within an overall envelope of EUR 79.5 billion14. The proposal replaces these obligations with qualitative orientations and envelopes explicitly described as indicative, adjustable through the annual budgetary procedure. The only remaining quantitative constraint is the 90% official development assistance threshold — and that threshold can itself, on ECDPM’s reading, be amended by delegated act without reopening the regulation15.

The same movement runs through the procedural machinery. The thresholds above which measures must go through comitology are doubled, raising to EUR 10 million the individual measures and to EUR 20 million the special measures the Commission may adopt without ordinary scrutiny. The multiannual indicative programmes — the instrument of joint programming with partner countries — may be amended “as necessary” following crises and, on duly justified imperative grounds of urgency, through immediately applicable acts. Finally, support for democracy, human rights and civil society loses its dedicated thematic programme and is relegated to the annexes, without an allocation of its own.

The serious objection deserves to be heard before it is set aside: quantified targets have pathologies of their own. Climate-marking projects that qualify only incidentally, the expansive attribution of migration-related expenditure, and the counting as aid of costs incurred on the donor’s own territory are documented practices. A poorly designed target produces accounting compliance, not policy. The argument is admissible. It does not, however, lead to the conclusion drawn from it. From an imperfect system of targets, one may infer that the target should be better defined and better verified; one does not infer that every enforceable obligation should be removed and none put in its place. Yet the proposal removes the targets without introducing the accountability mechanism that would stand in their stead. It makes execution freer without making justification more demanding.

The resulting institutional shift is clear. Under the current regime, Parliament and Council exercise influence ex ante, by writing obligations into the text. Under the proposed regime, they would exercise it ex post, by scrutinising an execution that has become largely discretionary — with the means of information available to them, that is, those the Commission transmits. The inversion is not neutral: it transfers the initiative in defining priorities to the body that executes them.

C. What flexibility already produces, before it is even exercised

It is sometimes answered that flexibility is a neutral tool, whose effects will be determined by use alone. The proposal allows that claim to be tested, since it already contains a distribution.

The analysis published by Bruegel on 25 June 2026 works out the ratios. Over the 2028-2034 period, the proposed envelope represents around EUR 10.90 per inhabitant per year for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region, against EUR 5.90 for sub-Saharan Africa. Measured not against total population but against people living in extreme poverty, the disproportion becomes of another order: roughly EUR 319 per person per year for the first region, roughly EUR 16 for the second — a ratio of twenty to one, even though sub-Saharan Africa concentrates the vast majority of the world’s extreme poverty. The same analysis notes that the United Nations objective of devoting 0.2% of gross national income to the least developed countries loses its binding character in the proposal16.

These figures do not describe a future abuse. They describe the trade-off already written into the text submitted to the co-legislators. Flexibility is not neutral: its direction is known before the first euro is committed. It favours geographic proximity, migration management and strategic interest, at the expense of the poverty criterion on which the Union’s competence in development cooperation legally rests.

III. Declared symmetry and instrumented asymmetry

A. Luanda’s new register

It would be wrong to present the evolution of European discourse as mere packaging. The seventh summit between the African Union and the European Union, held in Luanda on 24 and 25 November 2025 under the theme of promoting peace and prosperity through effective multilateralism, produced a joint declaration structured around forty-nine points whose register marks a real inflection. The text projects long-term cooperation, beyond the 2030 Agenda, between two entities carrying political agendas of their own, and presents itself as a strategic partnership rather than a framework of assistance17. The summit marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the partnership, and was held in the year the African Union had made reparations its annual theme — context that situates the demand for symmetry advanced by the African side.

This register sits within a treaty architecture that has itself been renewed. The Samoa Agreement, signed on 15 November 2023, replaced the Cotonou Agreement and organises cooperation around six priority areas: human rights, democracy and governance; peace and security; human and social development; inclusive and sustainable economic growth; environmental sustainability and climate change; and migration and mobility18.

The formula that captures this shift is well known: moving from aid to co-investment. It is defensible. It corresponds to a demand long made by African partners, and it takes account of an economic reality — aid’s share of financial flows to the continent has fallen considerably relative to diaspora transfers, direct investment and market borrowing.

B. What the instrument does, while the discourse speaks

It is the juxtaposition of the two sequences that raises the difficulty.

The proposed instrument establishes Global Gateway as the vehicle for implementation and assigns it a “dual objective”: to serve the sustainable development of partner countries and the strategic interests of the Union. This formulation, which ECDPM locates in Article 5 of the proposal, conceals nothing — that is even its merit. But it comes with means that lean distinctly to one side: the possibility of awarding direct grants to companies established in the Union for projects of strategic interest — critical raw materials, infrastructure, climate resilience — without a competitive call for proposals; the explicit extension of budgetary guarantees to export credit agencies; and the integration of blended public grants and loans within a single mechanism19.

The Lobito corridor offers the textbook case. The rail link connecting the Congolese and Zambian copperbelt to the Angolan port of Lobito has mobilised, under Global Gateway and through the “Team Europe” approach bringing together the Union, its member states and their financial institutions, more than two billion euros. The supply objective is explicit in the public communication surrounding it, the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounting for around 70% of world cobalt production20. The project may well serve the development of the three countries it crosses; nothing rules that out, and transport infrastructure is a genuine need. But its primary justification is a European supply policy, and denying that would help no one. The pertinent question is not whether the European interest is legitimate — it is — but whether its pursuit should be counted as official development assistance and presented as such.

C. The clause that settles the matter

One element of the proposal makes it possible to settle the debate on symmetry, because it does not lend itself to interpretation.

Where the regulation in force treats migration cooperation through an incentive-based approach, the proposal integrates migration as a cross-cutting element of the entire instrument and introduces a clause allowing the Commission to suspend support for a country that fails to cooperate on the readmission of its nationals — a provision ECDPM locates in Article 12(3), and whose exact scope will depend on the final drafting21. We thus move from positive incentive to explicit negative leverage.

The reasoning here requires no moral judgment on migration policy. Logic suffices. A partnership between equals is defined by what each party can require of the other, and by the means at its disposal to obtain it. The instrument confers on one party alone the power to suspend performance unilaterally, and the trigger for that suspension is a domestic policy objective belonging to that same party. The African side has no symmetrical mechanism: no procedure allows it to have a European commitment declared unmet, or to draw any consequence from that. One may argue that this imbalance is justified; one cannot argue that it is symmetrical.

This is where the central proposition of this contribution is tied. Under the earlier regime, the asymmetry of the relationship was inscribed in its stated purpose — one party gave aid, the other received it. That formulation was paternalistic, and criticism of it was well founded. But it had a property one perceives more clearly now that it is disappearing: it was visible, and therefore contestable. The new regime abandons the asymmetrical purpose and retains, by relocating it, the asymmetry of power: it now resides in the procedural structure of the instrument — envelopes revisable unilaterally, programming amendable mid-execution, a one-way suspension clause. The language has advanced; the procedure has regressed. And a procedural asymmetry has this particular quality: it cannot readily be contested in the forums where summits are held, because it is not stated there.

IV. What remains negotiable

The institutional sequence under way is narrow but real, and it has already begun. The Council settled its negotiating position on 16 June 2026: EUR 169.54 billion, that is EUR 7.29 billion less than the Commission’s proposal on the same price base, together with a strengthening of its own control over implementing decisions relating to enlargement, the eastern neighbourhood and migration cooperation. Parliament, for its part, is asking for EUR 198.63 billion. Its development and foreign affairs committees are to vote on their joint report in September 2026; plenary will decide during the first October session, setting the negotiating mandate; trilogues will open thereafter22.

This record speaks for itself. The additional control the Council claims bears on three objects — enlargement, the eastern neighbourhood, migration cooperation — none of which is cooperation with Africa. Where member states insist on keeping their hand in, they write it down; where they do not, the Commission’s flexibility does not trouble them.

The battle over volume is lost, and it is more useful to acknowledge this than to fight it: the three positions on the table range between EUR 169 and 199 billion, and none of them restores the constraints that were removed. The battle over form remains open, and it is the one that will determine what the relationship still allows either side to require. Four requirements appear worth defending.

1. An enforceable floor for the least developed countries. The 0.2% of gross national income objective need not remain an orientation. Failing to make it binding, an intermediate solution exists: keep the objective and attach to any departure from it an obligation of prior public justification. The constraint would then bear on the reasoning, not on the amount.

2. Public qualification of departures from indicative envelopes. If geographic allocations become indicative, the logical consequence is not that they cease to bind: it is that failure to observe them must be recorded and reasoned. Flexibility coupled with an obligation to account for its exercise remains flexibility; flexibility without a trace is a blank delegation.

3. Separating the logics in the accounting. What serves the security of European supply, support for companies established in the Union, or migration management may be legitimate and deserve funding; such expenditure should not be charged to official development assistance without a distinct and verifiable justification. The power to amend the 90% threshold by delegated act is, from this standpoint, the weak point of the arrangement: it allows the boundary to be moved without debate.

4. Predictability as an obligation owed to the partner. The possibility of revising multiannual indicative programmes mid-execution should be bounded: prior notification, a statement of reasons, and a consultation procedure with the country concerned. Predictability is not a favour granted to the partner; it is the condition for the financing to be integrable into public management, and therefore the condition of its effectiveness.

These requirements share one feature. None asks for an additional euro, and none contests the very principle of a more flexible instrument. All bear on the traceability of the decision. It is the only ground on which a Parliament weakened in its ex ante power can still rebuild a grip, and it is also the only one that gives African partners a precise thing to ask for, rather than a general posture to adopt.

Conclusion

The European Union asks its African partners to accept that partnership replaces aid. The request is admissible, and the vocabulary of aid had run its course. But a partnership is not defined by the register of its declarations: it is defined by what each party can require of the other, and by the procedures that make that requirement effective.

The reform under way reduces, on both sides, what can be required. It reduces what the European Parliament can require of the Commission, by removing the quantified obligations that constituted its ex ante grip. It reduces what African partners can require of the Union, by making envelopes revisable, programming amendable and suspension unilateral. It increases, on the other hand, and appreciably, what the Union can require of them, through the integration of migration conditionality across the whole instrument.

This is not a betrayal; it is an assumed conversion of development policy into an instrument of foreign policy, and the Union publicly claims that logic. One should merely guard against a confusion: this conversion does not produce a more equal partnership, it produces a partnership whose inequality is less stated. Between the two, the difference is not moral. It is practical: one can only properly contest what is written down.

Bibliography

Institutional and normative sources

• European Commission, proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the Global Europe instrument, 16 July 2025, within the 2028-2034 multiannual financial framework.
• Regulation (EU) 2021/947 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 June 2021 establishing the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument — Global Europe.
• Council of the European Union, conclusions on Global Gateway, 15 June 2026.
• European Parliament, Legislative Train Schedule, “Global Europe” file (AFET and DEVE committees), 2026 state of play.
• African Union and European Union, joint declaration of the seventh AU-EU summit, Luanda, 24-25 November 2025.
• Partnership agreement between the European Union and members of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (Samoa Agreement), signed 15 November 2023.
• Sénat (France), report on the 2026 finance bill, “official development assistance” mission.

Data and reports

• OECD, “A historic decline in foreign aid: preliminary 2025 ODA data”, 9 April 2026.
• OECD, ODA Projections for 2026 and the Near Term, 2026.
• OECD, Cuts in Official Development Assistance, 2025.
• International Monetary Fund, Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa, chapter 2, “Aid Cuts in Sub-Saharan Africa: This Time Is Different”, April 2026.
• Focus 2030, “Historic drop in official development assistance in 2025” and “2026 finance bill: a fifth cut in French official development assistance”, 2026.

Analyses of the reform

• ECDPM, A Companion Guide to the Global Europe Instrument Proposal, 2025-2026.
• ECDPM, Vademecum on the proposal establishing a Global Europe instrument, 2026.
• ECDPM, The Consequences of International Aid Cuts, 2026.
• Bruegel, “Less focus on poverty reduction? An evaluation of the EU 2028-2034 development aid plan”, 25 June 2026.
• ECDPM, “The Global Gateway: Striking a Balance between EU Interests and Genuine Partnerships”.
• European Think Tanks Group, “Navigating Global Ambitions: The EU’s Development in the Next MFF 2028-2034”.
• ODI, “The EU’s New Global Europe Pillar: Key Priorities to Watch”.

European development policy and EU-Africa relations

• CARBONE M., The European Union and International Development. The Politics of Foreign Aid, London, Routledge, 2007.
• HOLLAND M. and DOIDGE M., Development Policy of the European Union, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• JONES A., KEIJZER N., FRIESEN I. and VERON P., EU Development Cooperation with Sub-Saharan Africa 2013-2018. Policies, Funding, Results, ECDPM and Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik, May 2020.
• LANGAN M., Neo-Colonialism and the Poverty of “Development” in Africa, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
• SEVERINO J.-M. and RAY O., Le grand basculement. La question sociale à l’échelle mondiale, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2011.

Aid effectiveness, volatility and conditionality

• EASTERLY W., The White Man’s Burden. Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, New York, Penguin Press, 2006.
• KHARAS H., Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, Wolfensohn Center for Development Working Paper no. 3, Washington, Brookings Institution, July 2008.
• MOYO D., Dead Aid. Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Notes

1. OECD, “A historic decline in foreign aid: preliminary 2025 ODA data”, preliminary data published 9 April 2026.
2. Council of the European Union, conclusions on Global Gateway, 15 June 2026. The quoted formula is that of the official presentation of the conclusions.
3. European Parliament, Legislative Train Schedule, “Global Europe” file; rapporteurs Michael Gahler (EPP, Germany) for AFET and Robert Biedroń (S&D, Poland) for DEVE. The timetable indicated is the one announced by the committees and remains subject to adjustment.
4. OECD, preliminary 2025 data, op. cit. The five largest donors account for more than 95% of the total decline.
5. Ibid. The aid-to-gross-national-income ratio for DAC members falls from 0.34% to 0.26%.
6. OECD, ODA Projections for 2026 and the Near Term, 2026. That publication puts the overall 2026 decline at 6.9%; the April preliminary data, established on a slightly different basis, indicated 5.8%. The gap reflects scope and the cut-off date of the estimates.
7. ECDPM, The Consequences of International Aid Cuts, 2026, on the basis of OECD data.
8. Focus 2030, analysis of the 2026 finance act; Sénat, report on the 2026 finance bill, “official development assistance” mission. Appropriations for the mission fall from EUR 4.373 billion in the 2025 finance act to EUR 3.569 billion, a decrease of 18%.
9. EASTERLY W., The White Man’s Burden, New York, Penguin Press, 2006; MOYO D., Dead Aid, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. These critiques are cited here for their methodological reach, not for their policy conclusions, which are contested.
10. KHARAS H., Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, Wolfensohn Center for Development Working Paper no. 3, Brookings Institution, July 2008.
11. International Monetary Fund, Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa, April 2026, chapter 2.
12. European Commission, proposal of 16 July 2025; ECDPM, A Companion Guide to the Global Europe Instrument Proposal, and Bruegel, art. cited, for the EUR 200.3 billion figure and the 0.14% of GNI ratio; European Parliament, Legislative Train Schedule, for the EUR 176.83 billion figure. Reconciling the two price bases would need to be established against the proposal’s financial statement.
13. ECDPM, A Companion Guide, op. cit. The amounts per pillar are those of the initial proposal and have no binding value.
14. Regulation (EU) 2021/947, provisions on spending targets and indicative amounts by geographic area; overall envelope of EUR 79.5 billion, including a cushion of EUR 9.53 billion.
15. ECDPM, A Companion Guide, op. cit. The article references to the proposal are taken from that analysis; they should be verified against the text as the negotiation amends it.
16. Bruegel, “Less focus on poverty reduction? An evaluation of the EU 2028-2034 development aid plan”, 25 June 2026. The per-capita ratios are calculated by the authors on the basis of the proposed envelopes and demographic projections; they hold as orders of magnitude.
17. Joint declaration of the seventh AU-EU summit, Luanda, 24-25 November 2025, structured around forty-nine points. The characterisations given here are those of the summit reports; the full text of the declaration should be consulted for any literal quotation.
18. Samoa Agreement, signed 15 November 2023, strategic priority areas.
19. ECDPM, A Companion Guide, op. cit., on the dual objective and the so-called competitiveness instruments.
20. European Commission, documentation on the Lobito corridor and the Africa-Europe investment package (“Team Europe” approach, more than two billion euros invested across Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia). The Congolese share of world cobalt production is estimated at between 70% and 75% depending on the source.
21. ECDPM, A Companion Guide, op. cit. The characterisation as a “suspension clause” is that of the cited analysis.
22. European Parliament, Legislative Train Schedule, “Global Europe” file: Council negotiating position settled on 16 June 2026 at EUR 169.54 billion, against EUR 176.83 billion proposed by the Commission and EUR 198.63 billion requested by Parliament, the three amounts being expressed on the same price base.