EU Budget Breaks: Costa's Plan Leaves Workers Paying

The number is €2 trillion. Say it slowly. That is the figure European Council President António Costa is trying to conjure into existence for the EU's next long-term budget — and the central question he cannot answer cleanly is where, exactly, it comes from. His answer, offered in Brussels with the measured confidence of someone who has already run the calculation, is new taxes. Not reshuffled revenue. Not repackaged contributions. Taxes that no EU government is currently raising.

That is either visionary or a confession. Possibly both.

The backdrop makes it worse. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in Brussels already diminished — his party's poor showing in regional elections has hollowed out whatever negotiating authority he thought he carried. Germany is the EU's largest net contributor. A weakened Merz means a weakened German commitment, which means the arithmetic on Costa's €2 trillion does not add up the way it needs to. Berlin's silence on new fiscal instruments has always been the loudest sound in any European budget room. Right now, that silence is deafening.

Meanwhile, Polymarket — the American prediction markets platform — has chosen this particular moment to push Brussels for recognition as a financial services firm rather than a gambling operation. The timing is not accidental. When institutions are scrambling for revenue models and the definition of legitimate finance is already being renegotiated, a platform that lets users bet on election outcomes or treaty ratifications wants a seat at the grown-ups' table. Whether that seat comes with regulatory teeth or a polite letter of acknowledgement depends entirely on which commissioners are paying attention and which ones are distracted by the budget crisis consuming the room next door.

And there is always a room next door. Japan's Prime Minister flew to Washington to ask Donald Trump for help managing China's economic pressure — a reminder that every budget negotiation in Brussels happens inside a larger geopolitical frame that European leaders did not design and cannot fully control. Trump's instinct is bilateral. Costa's instinct is collective. These do not resolve easily.

What gets lost in the architecture of all this is the ordinary taxpayer — Maltese, German, Portuguese — who will eventually be handed a bill dressed up as solidarity. Costa is right that the EU cannot run a €2 trillion ambition on existing revenue streams. He is less forthcoming about who absorbs the gap while the new tax instruments are being designed, legislated, and inevitably delayed. That person is not in the room in Brussels. They are not in the room in Washington. They drive to work at six in the morning and they trust that someone, somewhere, is doing the sums honestly.

The sums are not being done honestly. They are being done hopefully, which is a different thing entirely.