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10:46 20.10.2026 •
EU leaders locked horns over everything
Photo: AFP
Leaders left crucial decisions on the bloc’s long-term budget and Ukraine’s financial needs to further gatherings in November and December, POLITICO reports.
EU leaders locked horns over everything from climate rules to migration policy and Ukraine’s long-term financial needs during two days of tense discussions in Brussels.
But despite calls for urgent action, the main takeaway from Thursday and Friday’s European Council summit is that key decisions have been delayed to a later date.
With elections looming in Spain and France, and as leaders’ positions seem more entrenched than ever, nothing of substance was put down in ink. Ukrainian Zelenskyy, who made the trip to Belgium, did not receive much more than warm embraces and kind words.
After hours of talks about Ukraine, “nothing has changed,” said Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. “The money is not lost but in my belief nothing has happened since we had the discussion last time.”
“In the short term, money to support Ukraine must come from other sources than the frozen assets,” he concluded.
The leaders “didn’t spend a lot of time” trying to come up with a plan to fund Ukraine in 2027, after Zelenskyy said his country would face a €70 billion budget hole next year, European Council President António Costa said. “We agreed immediately that we need to address the additional needs of financing Ukraine in 2027 and asked Commission to come up with concrete proposal.”
Yet leaders declined to endorse any of those options during news conferences at the end of the summit.
Money talks drag on
The gathering had also been billed as a chance for leaders to break a months-old deadlock over the size and shape of the EU’s nearly €2 trillion long-term budget.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who leaves office next year ahead of a presidential election in April and June, warned leaders that he would no longer have a political mandate to ink a deal if no deal was concluded by the end of this year.
But despite hours of talks on Thursday, neither the frugal camp led by Germany — which advocates a smaller budget — nor the “Friends of Cohesion” group calling for a larger envelope had made any substantial step toward each other.
“I think [a decision] is possible by the end of the year,” Macron told journalists at the summit’s conclusion, adding that failure to strike a deal this year would not “be a good method from a democratic standpoint.”
Instead, leaders spent much of the two-day summit trying to gain a tactical upper hand over rivals on EU climate rules and migration policy.
Trench warfare
On migration, Denmark, Italy and Poland led a determined effort to harden the EU’s position, proposing tweaks to the summit’s conclusions that would have explicitly linked irregular migration to crime rates and branded the phenomenon a threat to the cohesion of European societies.
The proposal, which ultimately won support from a group of around 10 countries including Hungary, according to two EU diplomats, also indirectly took aim at Spain, where Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to regularize some 1 million irregular migrants has sparked clashes with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen.
Ursula von der Leyen confirmed that the Commission would put forward an emergency response framework before the end of the year to allow EU countries to respond to a sudden mass movement, such as the one that caused chaos in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta over the summer.
But the effort led by Meloni and Frederiksen ended in defeat, with the proposed paragraphs deleted from the summit’s final conclusions, which only contained a truncated version.
Macron criticized the discussions on migration, saying they had been excessively “politicized.”
“It was a bad debate because it has been highly politicized and it has been a major source of division around the table,” the French president said.
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