With the handover from the Cypriot to the Irish Presidency, negotiations on the future Multiannual Financial Framework are shifting towards resources and governance. What has been decided, what remains open, and what the implications are for the cultural sector.

The new architecture

From 2028, the majority of EU funds under shared management will be brought together into a single Fund for economic, social and territorial cohesion, agriculture and rural development, fisheries and maritime policy, prosperity and security. Implementation will take place through 27 National and Regional Partnership Plans (NRPPs), one for each Member State: a single plan replacing the current separate programmes covering cohesion, agriculture, fisheries, migration, security and the Social Climate Fund. Each Plan will contain a package of reforms, investments and measures, will be negotiated bilaterally with the Commission, and will receive funding only once approved.

Developments under the Cypriot Presidency

On 16 June, the Council adopted partial negotiating mandates on the three pillars of the future budget — the Regulation on the NRPPs, the European Competitiveness Fund and the Global Europe instrument. They are “partial” because they exclude financial and horizontal issues, which have been deferred to negotiations on the MFF as a whole. The political significance nevertheless remains considerable: the architecture proposed by the Commission on 16 July 2025 is no longer being challenged by the Member States and has become the operational basis for the negotiations, including ahead of discussions with the European Parliament, whose final consent is legally required.

On 11 June, the Cypriot Presidency presented the first negotiating framework containing a full set of figures. A comparison with the Commission proposal shows a relatively limited overall reduction, concentrated on budget lines related to competitiveness and external action, while funding for the Partnership Plans remains broadly preserved.

The European Council of 18–19 June acknowledged progress on the overall architecture but did not resolve the central issue: how to finance the budget, particularly the new own resources needed to cover repayment of NextGenerationEU debt.

The latest developments

• Since 1 July 2026, Ireland has held the rotating Presidency, with the MFF negotiations as the main dossier of its six-month term.
• The European Council has tasked Dublin with presenting a second, more advanced and balanced negotiating framework by the 15 October 2026 summit. The new text will have to link each spending request to the corresponding source of funding, moving beyond the approach taken in the Cypriot document.
• The shared objective remains to reach a political agreement by December 2026, leaving 2027 for the adoption of the sector-specific regulations and enabling the new programmes to start on 1 January 2028. As 2027 will be an election year in several Member States, postponement without significant costs appears unlikely.
• The first national Plans are expected from the second half of 2027. The window for influencing their content therefore opens now and will close over the next twelve months.

The issues still to be resolved

The overall size of the financial framework, the system of own resources, the balance between traditional policies and new strategic priorities, the degree of budgetary flexibility and — most importantly for public administrations — the governance of the Partnership Plans all remain to be defined: how much room will be given to the Regions, which partnership requirements will be binding, and how expenditure will be verified and reported within a system built around objectives and results rather than separate programmes.

What this means for culture

• A single framework. With the phasing out of sector-specific programmes, measures concerning cultural heritage, cultural venues and cultural and creative businesses will have to be accommodated within Italy’s national Plan. Securing a clearly identifiable thematic chapter, with its own allocation and indicators, therefore becomes a negotiating objective in its own right.
• A priority that needs to be substantiated. The explicit priorities of the new programming cycle are competitiveness, strategic technologies, economic security and defence capabilities. Culture is not among the headline priorities — except within specific programmes such as AgoraEU — and therefore needs to be framed as a driver of sustainable territorial prosperity: heritage regeneration, sustainable tourism, creative value chains, accessibility and digitalisation, as well as a cross-cutting dimension of place quality, in line with the New European Bauhaus approach.
• Categories are still open. The intervention fields set out in the regulations are defined in broad terms and do not yet clarify what will be eligible in practice. Engaging at this stage is more effective than intervening once the categories have been finalised.
• Programming needs to begin now. With the Plan managed at national level, both counterparts and responsibilities will change: a stable coordination mechanism with the Regions will be needed, together with a mapping of post-NRRP measures that could continue under the new programming cycle and an estimate of funding needs prepared before the Plan takes its final shape.