As budget talks ramped up, so did the resistance.
Farm lobbyists mobilized. Agriculture ministers revolted. The Commission’s own agriculture chief, Christophe Hansen, began pushing back internally. Germany’s governing Christian Democrats wrote to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who hails from the party, urging their “Dear Ursula” not to fold the farm budget into broader spending plans.
“Cuts to the Common Agricultural Policy would send out completely the wrong signal,” Johannes Steiniger, one of the authors of the letter, told POLITICO. “The CAP must continue to have an independent and reliable budget.”
The goal had been to fundamentally reshape how the farm budget worked. But in the end, the next CAP will look much like the current one, with its basic structure left intact.
By June, the Commission had quietly shelved the restructuring plan. Jan Olbrycht, a special adviser to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, said the CAP would remain as a separate pillar in the EU’s 2028-2034 budget. Rural development funding would stay within the CAP’s two-pillar structure. Earlier ideas to shift that money to the cohesion rubric were, Olbrycht said, “over, finished.”
That marked a major retreat before the official unveiling of the Commission’s budget proposal on July 16. And it has underscored the raw political power the farm lobby can still exert in Brussels, even as the number of farmers declines and the EU faces growing calls to redirect money toward strategic challenges.
