The €1.8 trillion standoff

Summary

Brussels Playbook Podcast – “The €1.8 trillion standoff”

Date: April 28, 2026
Hosts: Zoya Sheftalovich and Nick Vinicour

---

Episode Overview

This episode dives into pivotal debates shaping the EU’s future, centering on a dramatic standoff over the next seven-year EU budget (the Multiannual Financial Framework, or MFF)—a €1.8 trillion package. The hosts break down the European Parliament’s push for increased spending, clashes with fiscally conservative member states, and emerging questions over priority areas such as defense, climate, and debt repayment. Key secondary themes include the Commission’s drive to cut red tape, controversial proposals for an EU-wide age verification app, and a lively listener debate on Sunday shopping hours.

---

Main Segments & Key Discussion Points

1. The EU’s Next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF)

[01:14 – 04:37]

• Parliament's Ambitious Stance:

  • Today's key vote has the European Parliament seeking a 10% higher spend than the Commission’s proposal for the 2028–2034 MFF—pushing the ceiling near €2 trillion.
  • Focus: more spending on climate, support for Ukraine, defense, competitiveness, agriculture, and cohesion.
  • Parliament wants COVID debt repayments separated from the core budget, to avoid cutting into programmatic spending.
    • Zoya: “We’re going to be spending those trillies, baby.” [01:54]

• Tensions with Member States & the Commission:

  • Some states (Germany, Netherlands) demand budget restraint, citing domestic belt-tightening and opposition to staff increases.
  • The fight is institution vs. institution: Parliament’s united position against Council/Commission pushback.
  • Notable quote:
    • Nick (quoting MFF rapporteur Siegfried Mureșan):

      “If the prime ministers and presidents want Europe to do more, they’ve got to give us more money. You can’t have a do more with less money approach.” [02:52]

  • Parliament unity signals pro-European factions banding together, crossing political lines—“the center has to hold here.” [04:10]

---

2. The “Better Regulation” Push and Bureaucracy Battles

[04:37 – 08:20]

• Von der Leyen Faces Conservative Pressure:

  • After meeting CDU/CSU leaders in Berlin who demand deregulation, Commission President von der Leyen insists Brussels is “deeply committed to cutting bureaucracy.”
  • She sidesteps proposals for an external veto body (“putting the Commission on a leash”).
    • Nick: “She tried to play it down...framed it as an alignment rather than a real clash.” [05:18]

• Spring Cleaning EU Laws:

  • The College of Commissioners meets today to discuss “Better Regulation,” spearheaded by Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis.
  • Objectives: cut red tape, simplify and make laws more flexible, reduce duplication (cue playful banter: “duplification”) [06:31–06:51].

• Worries About Weakening Safeguards:

  • NGOs and legal experts warn regulatory simplification may undercut EU standards on environment and human rights if impact assessments are bypassed.
  • Nick:

    “People are saying, well, this is simplification. We’re moving into deregulation...it could lower standards on things like environmental or human rights protection.” [07:44]

---

3. Controversy: The EU Age Verification App

[08:20 – 11:16]

• What’s Proposed:

  • A new app would require users to upload government IDs and run a biometric (face scan) check to prove age for accessing restricted content.
  • Aimed at protecting children from inappropriate content (adult sites, gambling, etc.).

• Immediate Concerns & Criticism:

  • Security flaws: “Hacked within minutes,” biometric checks bypassed, easy circumvention via VPNs.
  • Zoya compares with Australia’s efforts, concluding, “most kids are able to get around this.” [09:59]
  • Resistance from several EU countries preferring their own, possibly less intrusive, solutions.

• The Wider Debate for Parents:

  • Why pursue imperfect solutions?—Some measures have value as conversation tools for parents, even if enforcement is spotty.
    • Zoya:

      “People are looking for something, anything they can point to, to say, hey, this is the rule.” [11:16]

    • Nick:

      “Our children are five and seven and it’s actually really helpful to be able to say, sorry, this program is from 8 years old and they kind of accept that. It’s like magic.” [11:49]

• Engagement Prompt:

  • Zoya invites listeners to voice opinions on age verification and digital restrictions for youth.

---

4. Listener Responses: Sunday Shopping in Brussels

[12:32 – 13:43]

• Lively Debate:
  • Majority support (especially from locals) for keeping shops closed on Sundays, prioritizing work-life balance and neighborhood life.
    • Pedro from the Netherlands:

      “…we should be fighting for fewer working hours so we can do our groceries and shopping therapy during the week…” [12:34]

    • David from Portugal:

      “Sundays are for markets, friends and family, neighborhood life, cafes, cinema, bookshops, parks…” [13:07]

  • Hosts reflect humorously on being “called out” for expat consumerist attitudes.

---

Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• “We’re going to be spending those trillies, baby.”
  Zoya Sheftalovich, joking about the scale of Parliament’s budget demand [01:54]

• “You can’t have a do more with less money approach.”
  Nick Vinicour, relaying Siegfried Mureșan’s argument for increased budget [02:52]

• Policy vs. Practice Banter:
  “Duplification.”
  Zoya accidentally inventing a word while discussing ‘duplication’ of EU rules, prompting laughter [06:31–06:51]

• Safety and tech for kids:
  Zoya and Nick discuss the real value of regulation as a parenting tool.

  • “People are looking for something, anything they can point to, to say, hey, this is the rule.” [11:16]
  • “It’s actually really helpful to be able to say, sorry, this program is from 8 years old and they kind of accept that. It’s like magic.” [11:49]

---

Timestamps for Key Sections

• EU Budget/MFF standoff: 01:14 – 04:37
• Von der Leyen and Better Regulation: 04:37 – 08:20
• EU Age Verification App debate: 08:20 – 11:16
• Listener debate on Sunday shopping: 12:32 – 13:43

---

Tone & Style

Conversational, witty, and direct—Zoya and Nick combine deep reporting with friendly banter and audience engagement, keeping complex EU policy debates clear and accessible.

---

“It’s a real interesting vote, one to watch, folks.”
—Zoya Sheftalovich [04:37]

---

For further reading: Look out for colleague Mariann Ory’s reporting on legislative simplification, highlighted by the hosts as recommended context. [07:44]

Note: Ads and non-content sections omitted as per instructions.

Transcript

[Red Bull Announcer]

Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit Red Bull.com BrightSummerAhead to learn more. See you this summer.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Good morning. It's Tuesday, April 28, and this is the Brussels Playbook podcast. The vibe in Brussels today is spendy as the European Parliament is pushing for a bigger EU budget. Also on the pod, EU capitals aren't impressed with the Commission's age verification app and better regulation or fewer rules. Brussels is looking at how it writes its laws. I'm Zoya Shevdolovic and with me today again is Nick Vinicour, our chief foreign affairs correspondent. Hey, Nick.

[Nick Vinicour]

Hey.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

You know, we hit a real nerve yesterday with our comments about shop opening hours. We've had a deluge of people write in to our WhatsApp telling us what they think of us.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, I had a hunch that would, that would hit a nerve. But let's, let's get back to it.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, we'll get to those messages at the end of the show. First up, there's an important vote happening in the European Parliament later today. It's on the EU's next long term budget, aka the Multiannual Financial Framework, aka the MF Ethnic Yum. It's tasty. It's delicious. It's billions of euros. And basically what's happening is MEPs, they're setting out their position for talks with EU countries. And what they want is for a 10% higher spend than what the European Commission has proposed for that 2028-2034 budget, which is huge because we're talking about a budget of roughly 1.8 trillion over seven years.

[Nick Vinicour]

So this pushed you squarely into the 2 trillion mark.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

We're going to be spending those trillies, baby. But the Parliament is basically saying the Commission proposal, it's insufficient. They want a bigger budget to deal with everything that's on the table. That's like climate support for Ukraine, defense, competitiveness. But they also want more spending on things like agriculture and cohesion spending. And they want to keep debt repayments for Covid loans separate from the core budget so that they aren't eating into those programs.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, and of course, there's an obvious tension here because we've seen the Commission and certain member states saying, no, actually, we need a tight, tighter budget and we need to earmark some of this money for more spending on defense and innovation and perhaps less kind of guaranteed funds going to things like cohesion. And this is setting the Parliament on a collision course with the commission and also some of the big members of the council. Interestingly enough, the person who's presenting this to Rapporteur today is Siegfried Mirazan, a member of the European People's Party.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

And didn't you talk to this guy yesterday?

[Nick Vinicour]

I just spoke to him yesterday and he was pretty clear about saying, well, if the prime ministers and presidents want Europe to do more, they've got to give us more money. You can't have a do more with less money approach. And that's what the Parliament's going to defend.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, and that's the position of some of the southern countries who want to increase that spending. But then you've got the traditional belt tightness, your Germany's, your Netherlands, and they are really not interested in expanding the budget. They want to spend less. And their argument is, well, we're asking people to cut back at home, we're asking for budgets to be cut on the national level. And now you want to massively increase the budget for the eu.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, exactly. And they've even pushed back on more hiring in the EU institution. So they've told the commission they wanted to hire 2,500 additional staff over the budget period, the seven year long term budget. And they've said that is a non starter. We don't, we don't want you to do that.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, but look, in the Parliament today we're expecting a united position. So we are expecting this negotiated compromise across the pro EU groups to pass. It passed the committee stage with a pretty clear majority. So we, we think it will go through, but it's not unanimous. And the fight is going to occur over the next year or so while we're really doing this budget negotiation stuff.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, and Murazan was saying, of course anything can happen in democracy. He's expecting an even wider majority in Parliament and use the word, you know, the center has to hold here. We've talked a lot about the, the sort of fracturing majorities in Parliament. This is an example where the pro European factions in Parliament are really kind of banding together. And it's a parliament position and it's really sort of institution versus institution rather than political lines inside the Parliament.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Well, it's going to be a real interesting vote, one to watch, folks. And that's not the only action happening in Strasbek Today the College of Commissioners will be meeting in town and they've got a few things on their plate. But this comes right after Ursula von der Leyen, who's going to chair the meeting. She was in Berlin yesterday meeting German conservatives from Friedrich Merza's cdu, CSU coalition, and it was a really difficult meeting for her. We spoke about it yesterday. This was this meeting where they were basically telling her, you've got to cut the EU legislation, cut the rules and unshackle us and let us do business. How did she fare coming out of that meeting?

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, and that was a great scoop by Oliver Noyen on that push from the cdu. Well, she really tried to play it down when she came here. She said the commission was deeply committed to cutting bureaucracy. We're already doing this. She suggested a lot of the German ideas are already reflected in what Brussels is doing and she framed it as an alignment rather than a real clash. But she did skip over the more eye grabbing proposals in there, including to have a kind of oversight body that would put the Commission on a leash effectively and have a right of veto over legislation. And we did collect some reactions yesterday from members of the European Parliament saying this goes against the whole principle of how we organize things.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah. And either way, this conversation is going to be continuing today in Strasbourg.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah. So the College of Commissioners is also discussing something that fits in, which is better regulation. Now this is being led by Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskius, the EU's economy czar. And it's all about how the EU rights laws in the first place. So it's about writing the laws better so they work in practice and having more flexibility. I want to call it impact assessments. So a shorter time between the time when you say that you want a law and actually coming up with the text.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah. And the idea is they want some regulatory cleaning as well, which is like cutting overlaps and consistencies and any sort of duplification. Well, that's not how you say that word. I was duplication.

[Nick Vinicour]

It sounds almost right. Right. But it's the wrong word.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, well, sometimes it's going to happen, Nick. At this time of day, it's going to happen.

[Nick Vinicour]

I think it's. I think you just spoke duplication.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Well, they're going to be talking about basically not duplicating EU rules. So that's kind of going to be on the agenda. A bit of a spring clean. It is spring. Have you been spring cleaning?

[Nick Vinicour]

Well, my mother in law was in town and she got us started, so

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

I sensed some Some stories to be told in that, Nick. Well, anyway, look, the Commission has been doing spring cleaning over since Ursula von der Leyen took her second term in office. They've already proposed around, what, like 10 omnibus packages. Omnibus is just a fancy way of saying cutting. It's just bureaucracy cutting packages and it's fast tracking changes to various laws to reduce red tape. They want to be efficient, but it's, you know, slow going because they've just spent a whole term implementing various rules and now they want to unwind them.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, and we're seeing some pushback already from NGOs, legal experts saying this is going to weaken safeguards in the EU law. And people are saying, well, this is simplification. We're moving into deregulation, which would be a more straightforward way of describing it, especially if we cut out impact assessments. This is the process where you decide, well, what impact is this law going to have on actual people and businesses? And it could overall lower standards on things like environmental or human rights protection. And our colleague Marianne Grow is reporting on this very topic from Strasbourg. So look out for her stories on her website today.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

I can't wait to read it. Love an omnibus. There's another thing we're going to be hearing about from the Commissioners today, actually, Nick. It's this age verification app stuff. So this is something the Commission unveiled last week. It's an app that's designed to help protect kids online. Basically, if you're an Internet user, you have to upload an id, like a passport, a driver's license or something like that, and the app then will do a face scan to match it and tells platforms whether or not you're over 18, so that you can access certain content, certain websites, spicy websites, perhaps adult

[Nick Vinicour]

content, gambling, that sort of thing, whatever your preference is. But before this even rolled out, of course, there's already controversy around it. Security research showed that this app could be hacked within minutes. There are concerns that the biometric checks, that's the face scan, can be bypassed and that users can simply use a vpn, which is available to anyone to get around it.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, and this is something that my country, that I know best, as the EU Commission likes to put it, this is something I've been following in Australia because Australia implemented a kind of a world first social media restriction for youths, and they're using a different system there. Actually, you don't have to upload your id, but actually apps have to essentially determine by your browsing habits whether they think you're over 18 or not, or over 16. Actually, because that's the age for social media. Basically. They look at the websites that you use, the YouTube videos that you watch, and they can build a pretty good profile of you. But the data that's been coming out of Australia has shown that basically, almost. Well, most kids are able to get around this.

[Nick Vinicour]

Right. And of course, it's in the news because Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is pushing this. I believe Norway just got on board with a age limit for social media use, but people are still skeptical.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, and that's because, look, I think what we've seen coming out of both, when we saw this, the fact that the hackers could essentially break through the app in a couple of minutes, this EU one that was proposed, and the Australian example is just showing that there is a limit to what can be done. But that said, you know, it's tricky because if we were only going to be doing things that we could 100% police, we'd be left with not very many regulations. But in any case, look, some nations have come out and said, we prefer our own apps, we've got our own way of doing this and we don't really want the commission one. Others are saying, yeah, look, we'll, we'll look into it, see if this is the best way possible. But then there's some that are saying, they're pretty blunt. They're saying, nah, no way, this isn't for us. The commission is going ahead with this anyway, so we'll see that come out of the College of Commissioners today. It's a recommendation though, at this stage. So it's not a must, it's a. Here's an option for you. You're a parent, Nick, this must be something that you've been talking about at home with your kids.

[Nick Vinicour]

Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, mobile phones and social media use is a preoccupation for every parent. So I think people are really tracking this kind of debate very closely to see what kind of protections are going to be put in place for our kids.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah, I spoke with the Australia's esafety commissioner a while ago. Now we're talking about a year ago and also some others who were doing the implementation of this program in Australia. And one of the things that kept coming up was like, one of the things that parents liked about these sorts of restrictions is just it gave them a way of explaining to their teens or their pre teens, like, look, this is why you can't have this apple. This is why you can't use this. Because there is this rule that says you can't. So I think that's part of it as well. People are looking for something, anything they can point to, to say, hey, this is the rule.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, I mean our children are five and seven and it's actually really helpful to be able to say, sorry, this program is from 8 years old and they kind of accept that. It's like magic.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Why don't we hear from our listeners on this one, folks? WhatsApp link is in the show notes. Let us know where you stand on this one. Are you interested in these sorts of things? Do you hate it? If you're a young person who will likely have to upload your ID to use various sites, let us know what you think. Speaking Nick, of things we ask people to tell us about in our WhatsApp yesterday was quite the deluge of messages from people talking about their views on shops in Belgium or Brussels being open on a Sunday. And later, yeah, it turns out people

[Nick Vinicour]

have a lot of feelings about this.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

They have feelings and they have shared them with us. We've had Pedro from the Netherlands write in and he said we should be fighting for fewer working hours so we can do our groceries and shopping therapy during the week and not the other way around.

[Nick Vinicour]

John, what is there that I absolutely need to buy on a Sunday that I can't buy on a Saturday, instead denying many shop staff the day off work that I'm quite happy to enjoy myself?

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

I'm sensing a theme here. I think our consumerist expat ways are being called out. Nick.

[Nick Vinicour]

Yeah, there's definitely a majority of the responses in favor of keeping things as they are.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

Yeah. David from Portugal wrote in and said Sundays are for markets, friends and family, neighborhood life, cafes, cinema, bookshops, parks. Can I just say, David from Portugal, you can't get books at a bookshop in Brussels on a Sunday currently. So, you know, I agree Sundays are for bookshops. But he continues, if like many EU bubble people, your week is structured entirely around your laptop, guilty as charged. Then of course Sunday is just another opportunity to shop. Fair enough, fair enough, David.

[Nick Vinicour]

I kind of feel personally triggered by that because I'm writing the Playbook on Sunday and yeah, my day is structured around my laptop.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

David nailed it.

[Nick Vinicour]

Sorry David.

[Zoya Shevdolovic]

He tells the truth. Well, way to make us look selfish, folks, but let's keep this debate going. Send us your thoughts, keep them coming. And folks, I just want to say a personal thank you from me to you. I whinged yesterday about the fact that we were stuck on 676 reviews in our Spotify. And you came and you listened and you answered my prayers. And we've got dozens more that have come through in the last 24 hours. So thanks, folks. Keep them coming. As Nick said, let's get us to three figures. All right, folks, thank you so much for listening. Hit subscribe if you haven't already. I'll be back with you tomorrow.

[Bloomberg Announcer]

Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe [e-mail].