When we wrote about this last, the complaint from Europe's arts sector was arithmetic: under the Commission's plan, the culture strand of the EU's flagship cultural programme worked out at roughly nine cents in every €100 of the long-term budget. A year of institutional positioning later, the number has not improved. In the Parliament's supposedly generous version, it is closer to seven.
The vehicle is AgoraEU, the Commission's proposal from July 2025 to fold Creative Europe and the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme into a single instrument for 2028–2034, with three strands: Creative Europe – Culture, MEDIA+ and CERV+. Total: €8.6 billion, around 0.43% of the next Multiannual Financial Framework. Both co-legislators have now shown their hands, and the two positions are further apart than usual.
The European Parliament adopted its MFF position on 28 April 2026, proposing €10.72 billion for AgoraEU — an increase of €2.14 billion, or about 25%, the highest percentage rise of any programme under the competitiveness, prosperity and security heading. It sits inside a broader Parliament demand for €197.3 billion more across the whole budget, roughly 10%, including €25 billion extra for Horizon Europe and €30 billion for the European Competitiveness Fund. AgoraEU's share of the budget would rise from 0.43% to 0.53%.
The draft report, by rapporteurs Emma Rafowicz (S&D, France) and Alice Kuhnke (Greens, Sweden), also carries changes the sector has been asking for over several budget cycles: a dedicated objective on artists at risk, social conditionality requiring decent working conditions and fair pay as a condition of funding, operating grants and a two-stage application process, a possible 100% co-funding rate, wider re-granting to small organisations, and a proposal to top the programme up with fines collected under the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act and the AI Act. There is a strong push to restrict support to work with identifiable human authorship, aimed squarely at generative AI.
Then there is the restructuring. Parliament replaces the Commission's three strands with seven, carving out separate strands for music and for books and publishing, and reclassifying MEDIA as a culture strand. The culture family would take 46.4% of the programme: 30% for Culture (€1.49 billion), 15% for Music (€0.75 billion) and 55% for MEDIA (€2.74 billion).
Which produces an odd result. The programme grows by a quarter, and the general Culture strand shrinks — from €1.8 billion in the Commission's version to €1.49 billion. Culture Action Europe, the Brussels network representing the sector, has objected that the logic of selection is unclear: music gets a strand, books get an objective, and performing arts, visual arts, design and crafts get neither, despite drawing comparable amounts from Creative Europe in the current period. Several of the actions filed under the music strand — network support, artist mobility, easier access to funding — are not sector-specific needs at all.
The Council adopted a partial general approach on AgoraEU on 12 May 2026, covering the content of the programme and leaving the money in brackets. It keeps the Commission's three-strand architecture, reinstates a definition of the cultural and creative sectors, and mentions music, book publishing and libraries in the recitals rather than building strands around them.
The money came a month later. On 16 June the Cypriot Presidency published its negotiating box, which puts AgoraEU at €7.295 billion in constant prices — roughly 2% below the Commission's own proposal and a third below Parliament's. On Culture Action Europe's calculation, that is about €500 million a year less than the Parliament's figure across the seven-year period.
One comparison from the sector's advocacy has stuck, because it is checkable. Under the Commission's original proposal, the Creative Europe – Culture strand amounts to roughly €230 million a year in constant prices. The annual budget of the Bibliothèque nationale de France is slightly larger. The EU's core funding line for culture across 27 member states, in other words, is comparable to the running costs of one national library in one of them — and the Council's box would shrink it further.
That is not by itself an argument for any particular number. Culture is overwhelmingly funded nationally and locally, as it should be, and the EU's role is cross-border cooperation rather than keeping the lights on. But it does put the scale of the argument in proportion. The difference between the Parliament's position and the Council's, spread over seven years, is smaller than a rounding adjustment in the agriculture or cohesion headings.
Trilogues come next, and the Council has promised to settle the budget questions by the end of the year — a timetable most people in Brussels regard as optimistic. On past form the final figure lands between the two positions and nearer the Council's, because the Council holds the money and the Parliament holds mainly the power to delay. The more interesting fight may be structural rather than financial: whether Parliament's seven strands survive, whether social conditionality survives contact with member states that dislike EU conditions on national labour markets, and whether the idea of funding culture from digital enforcement fines gets anywhere. That last one would matter well beyond the arts — it would be the first time the EU hypothecated the proceeds of its tech regulation to a spending programme, and it would give the culture budget something it has never had: a revenue line that grows when Big Tech misbehaves.
