Every few years, the European Union sits down to do one of its most unglamorous but consequential tasks: deciding how to spend the common budget for the next seven years. These negotiations are usually wrapped in acronyms and spreadsheets, and they rarely make it into everyday conversation. But the choices made in these rooms shape what kind of Europe ordinary people actually live in. This autumn, the stakes feel especially high. At their summit on 15 and 16 October, European leaders failed to reach agreement on the Union’s next long-term budget, which will run from 2028 to 2034. European Council President António Costa is now expected to present a new proposal before a special summit on 26 November. The draft currently on the table contains a decision that should concern far more people than it has so far: a proposed 30% cut to AgoraEU, the EU’s programme for independent journalism, media literacy, civil society and culture. The programme would be reduced from €8.6 billion to €6 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But in the context of the entire EU budget, it is a tiny amount—a fraction of a single percent. What it buys, however, is something that cannot be easily measured in numbers: the resilience of democratic societies. More than 600 organisations across Europe have written to leaders to oppose the cut, pointing out that the savings are minuscule compared with the damage it could do to local news, cultural life, the space for civic activism, and the shared capacity to understand what is happening in the world. This is not just a matter of protecting a few cherished projects. It is a matter of whether Europe can actually enforce its own digital laws and defend itself against foreign interference.
To understand why, it helps to think of democracy not as a machine but as an ecosystem. A healthy forest needs more than trees; it needs soil, water, insects, birds, fungi, and a web of relationships that keep everything in balance. Democratic societies work the same way. They need independent journalists who investigate and report. They need fact-checkers who verify claims and debunk falsehoods. They need researchers who study what is happening online, track the spread of disinformation, and examine the behaviour of powerful platforms. They need media literacy experts who help citizens, especially young people, develop the skills to question what they see and read. And they need civil society organisations that turn research and evidence into public debate, advocacy, and accountability. None of these groups works in isolation. Journalists depend on researchers and fact-checkers for leads and verification. Citizens depend on journalists to ask hard questions. Civil society depends on the work of academics and analysts to ground its demands in evidence. And governments, when they are serious about protecting democracy, depend on all of them. This is not a luxury. It is the infrastructure of public trust. AgoraEU was designed to fund much of this ecosystem—to make sure it exists not just in the richest countries or the biggest cities, but across the Union, and not just in election years, but every year. Cutting it would not simply reduce a line item in a spreadsheet. It would thin out the living network that keeps European democracy open, pluralistic, and able to adapt to new threats. The fact that it would do so for a fraction of a percent of the budget is not a reasonable trade. It is an illusion of savings.
This is not an abstract worry. The European Parliament, which represents the citizens of the Union, has recently made the connection explicit. On 16 September, by a vote of 470 to 129, Parliament adopted a resolution on hybrid threats, describing them as a form of warfare. The resolution is blunt about what is at stake: foreign states and non-state actors can use information manipulation and interference to weaken democratic institutions, widen social divisions, and undermine elections. The Parliament called for a serious investment in civic education, media literacy, strategic communication, independent media, and investigative journalism. It also asked for networks like EDMO—the European Digital Media Observatory—to be strengthened, and for new automated tools capable of detecting disinformation campaigns at scale, as well as early-warning systems that can work across borders. In other words, the people who represent European voters see the protection of the information ecosystem as part of Europe’s security architecture. But the proposed budget cut goes in the opposite direction. It shrinks the very capacities that the Parliament has just identified as essential. There is a strange contradiction here, and it is worth naming plainly: European institutions are spending political capital on ambitious digital rules and democracy protection initiatives, while simultaneously preparing to starve the independent infrastructure that makes those rules work. You cannot write strict laws for the digital public sphere and then remove the resources needed to monitor, understand, and challenge the behaviour of the platforms that dominate it. The rules are only as strong as the people and organisations that are able to hold them up.
The link to digital regulation is crucial. The Digital Services Act, which came into force in recent years, requires the largest online platforms to assess and reduce systemic risks related to their design and functioning, including disinformation and threats to elections. Since 1 July 2025, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation has been integrated into that legal framework. This means that platforms now have formal obligations to address the spread of false information across their services. But this entire system rests on a single, often unspoken assumption: that there are independent journalists, researchers, and civil society groups capable of checking what platforms claim, testing their risk assessments, and holding them accountable in public. Compliance cannot be measured only by what platforms say about themselves. It has to be verified by people who are not employed by the platforms, do not depend on them for funding, and are willing to criticise them when they fall short. That independent capacity is precisely what AgoraEU supports. But it is already under strain. In 2025, major US technology companies scaled back their commitments under the disinformation code and restricted access to their data for researchers. This made it harder for independent observers to see what was happening on the largest platforms. As a result, the pressure on publicly funded institutions like EDMO increased. They have become even more essential, because they are now among the few actors that still have the mandate, the skills, and the independence to examine platform behaviour and share their findings with the public. If we cut their funding at exactly this moment, we are not saving money. We are making the enforcement of Europe’s own digital rules weaker and more dependent on the goodwill of the very companies that those rules are meant to regulate.
To understand what is at risk, look closely at EDMO. It is not a large, faraway bureaucracy. It is a network of researchers, fact-checkers, and media literacy experts working in fifteen regional hubs that together cover all EU member states, as well as Norway, Ukraine, and Moldova. Its role is to document disinformation campaigns as they unfold, analyse how platforms are behaving, identify vulnerabilities in particular countries and communities, and share what it learns with journalists, civil society organisations, public authorities, and ordinary citizens. It is deliberately independent: it does not take orders from national governments or from the European Commission. And it has already proven its worth in practice. Ahead of the 2024 European elections, EDMO ran a dedicated task force across member states, working on early detection, resilience building, and the rapid sharing of knowledge from one country to another. This kind of capacity is not something you can switch on when trouble arrives. It cannot be built in a few months before an election, or improvised in the middle of a crisis. It has to exist beforehand. It has to be funded continuously, with multi-year commitments, so that organisations can hire skilled staff, maintain trust with the communities they serve, and plan their work with some sense of security. Cutting AgoraEU would put this at risk. The harm would not be limited to a few professional researchers losing their jobs. It would be the slow erosion of the early-warning system that Europe needs to detect and respond to disinformation, not just during elections, but every day. The 2024 election task force was praised as a success. But success in the past does not guarantee survival in the future unless the funding is actually there.
So what does the proposed cut actually mean in terms of the wider picture? It weakens Europe on three distinct fronts. First, it thins out the information ecosystem that democratic resilience depends on—the journalists, fact-checkers, researchers, teachers, and activists who help citizens understand the world and make informed choices. Second, it makes Europe’s own digital rules harder to enforce, because those rules rely on independent evidence that platforms cannot be trusted to produce on their own. Third, it reduces the civilian capacity to detect and counter disinformation and foreign interference, which is exactly the opposite of what the European Parliament has called for and what the European Commission has promised through initiatives like the European Democracy Shield. The arithmetic is hard to defend. The AgoraEU cut would save about 0.14% of the total EU budget. Meanwhile, the draft budget also proposes cutting Global Europe, which supports democracy and civil society outside the Union, by 17%, and the European Competitiveness Fund, which is meant to absorb the EU’s digital programmes, by around 11%. These cuts are not marginal adjustments. They are a pattern. They reveal a budget that treats democracy support and information integrity as optional extras, to be trimmed whenever other priorities press in. This is a profound misunderstanding of what makes the European project work in the first place. As President Costa prepares his revised proposal, the negotiators have a real choice. They could keep AgoraEU at least at the level the Commission originally proposed, and ideally move towards the increase the Parliament has requested. They could build funding for democratic resilience into every relevant part of the budget, including digital, security, and external action, rather than concentrating it in one vulnerable programme. And they could provide this funding on a multi-year basis, so that independent organisations are not forced to live from one short grant to the next, constantly uncertain about their own future. Europe has already invested enormous political capital in setting rules for the digital public sphere. Those rules are necessary, but they are not sufficient. They can only work if there is a robust, independent information ecosystem around them, able to speak truth to power, check the claims of the most powerful companies and governments, and help citizens make sense of an increasingly complicated media environment. Protecting that ecosystem is not an extravagance. It costs a fraction of a percent of the budget. The real price of the proposed cut would be measured in lost independence, weakened enforcement, and a quieter, less curious, less resilient public sphere—a price that Europe would continue to pay for many years to come.