The Entanglement between Budget and Values in the European Union

Abstract : The budgetary reforms enacted in the wake of the pandemic have radically changed the face of the EU budget. Once depicted as ‘historical relic’, patently inconsistent with the EU’s increasing policies and objectives, the EU budget has recently and abruptly emerged as a key vector of European integration, ‘the future of our Union cast in figures’, as emphatically remarked by Commission President Von der Leyen in the 2021 State of the Union address. Within this evolution, the increasing entanglement between the EU budget and the EU founding values certainly represents a crucial development both in political and constitutional terms, especially in light of the enforcement challenges emerged in the management of the crises unfolding in Hungary and Poland. The presentation will trace the recent transformation of the EU budget into a key policy instrument to protect, promote and enforce the common values enclosed in art. 2 TEU. Particular attention will be paid on the design of a set of values-based financial instruments adopted in recent years (Conditionality Regulation, Recovery and Resilience Facility, Common Provisions Regulation and Justice, Rights and Values Fund) and on the challenges emerged in their implementation in the first half of the multiannual financial period