The latest proposal for the EU’s next long-term budget (2028-34) proposes 8% cuts compared to the Commission’s original proposal in July 2025.
The envelope for development cooperation and external action took a particularly hard hit: the Global Europe instrument alone would take a cut of over €33 billion, a disproportionate reduction of around 17%.
A similar pattern holds when you look at how member states have organised their priorities. While the so-called frugal coalition has pushed for substantial cuts to the overall budget, an opposing coalition composed of 17 states has advocated for nearly €900 billion of agriculture and cohesion funding to be preserved.
So far, however, no comparable state-led coalition has emerged to defend funding for Global Europe, the EU’s key mechanism for development cooperation and external partnerships. Individual governments have voiced concerns privately, but none has mobilised a coordinated bloc of states to make that case collectively.
The absence of such a coalition is striking. The European Commission repeatedly called Global Europe its key vehicle for 'a more strategic, values-driven, and impactful approach to enlargement, partnerships and diplomacy in alignment with the EU’s strategic interests'. It is among the budget lines most explicitly framed in strategic terms.
Yet it is also the line that no state-led coalition has, so far, rallied behind.
The cost of that neglect is already visible in the EU’s trade and industrial tensions with China. Chinese industrial overcapacity and state-supported exports put European companies under pressure in their own market, while the EU is being constrained in how far it can push back by its dependence on China for the critical minerals and rare earths essential for building its clean-tech, automotive and defence industries.
Such partnerships are not just about access. In 2022, the EU and Namibia signed a partnership on critical raw materials and renewable hydrogen. A year later, Namibia banned exports of unprocessed lithium and other critical minerals. This was intended to keep processing, and the added value that comes with it, at home. In July 2026, Namibia signed new agreements with China on infrastructure, mining, and energy.
The lesson is not that Europe has 'lost' Namibia. It is that mineral-producing countries are exercising greater agency: they are unwilling to accept importing-country terms and are increasingly able to seek alternatives.
This is exactly the kind of partnership Global Europe is meant to finance, one that connects partner-country development objectives with the EU’s strategic interests. It is also precisely the kind of partnership that becomes harder to build and sustain when that support is cut.
The way forward
There is a way forward, but it requires a serious rethink of development cooperation. The answer lies neither in moral mission nor in pure market transaction, but in something that sits deliberately in between. This is what an 'enabling layer' within the EU’s critical mineral strategy should do: finance the public goods that allow for responsible investment to happen in the first place.
That layer includes, among others, technical training, infrastructure development, geological surveys, and environmental safeguards; the conditions required for a mineral partnership to operate sustainably and responsibly. The EU has taken big steps to finance the infrastructure component, such as roads, railways, and ports, but it remains weaker in financing what producer countries themselves are asking for: local processing, technology transfers, and skills training.
This is not necessarily an intentional gap. It is the result of fragmented programming: money meant for developing enabling conditions sits in Global Europe, while money for industrial competitiveness sits elsewhere. Put simply: the two instruments have not been designed to work together.
Of course, there are serious trade-offs. Budgets are finite, and other priorities also have legitimate claims. Development cooperation risks being cut not because it mattered less, but because no significant state-led coalition is standing up to argue it matters more. It is tempting to read this silence as a verdict: national governments may have made a calculated bet that this budget line matters less to their voters.
But that misses a critical point: the EU needs partners in an increasingly fragmented world, and the stakes in building them are no idle concern. With Europe exposed twice over on critical minerals, and with no sufficiently scalable alternative to Chinese supply chains in place, building the enabling conditions for more resilient mineral supply chains has rightly become a strategic priority.
However, if the budget line most clearly tasked with supporting such partnerships is treated as expendable, then we are, deliberately or not, reducing the EU’s budget talks to a game of charades.
Development cooperation cannot be reduced to charity, nor to a transaction. Done well, it involves the difficult work of developing durable partnerships that can withstand the next humanitarian crisis, the next EU member state election, the next Chinese export licence. Today, that work still has no state-led coalition in the Council to defend it.
Until it does, EU budget negotiations will not be determined by strategic priorities, but by whichever coalitions show up for the fight. António Costa, President of the European Council and author of the next budget proposal, must have the political courage to ask a harder question than the one posed so far: not how much can be cut without a fight, but what Europe loses if the budget line intended to build its global partnerships is also the one defended by no one.
