Can the European social model survive?

In early May 2026, the European Commission published a strategy for combating poverty¹, ‘for the first time in the history of the European Union’. That is correct, although there were indeed anti-poverty programmes in the 1970s and 1980s. These were withdrawn when it became apparent that the EU had no powers whatsoever to tackle poverty.

Incidentally, to this day, one would search in vain for the word ‘poverty’ in the Treaties of the European Union. The Commission rightly reiterates that fighting poverty is a competence of national, regional and local authorities. The Union can, however, work against ‘exclusion’, but this applies primarily to the labour market.

Is this ‘strategy’ more important than a ‘programme’? Yes, in the sense that a strategy is perhaps more profound and can apply to various sectors in the long term. No, in the sense that, for the time being, no direct action to benefit poor people will result from it.

The Commission mentions a ‘moral obligation’ and Article 3 of the Treaty – which refers to the fight against social exclusion and discrimination and the promotion of social justice and protection – as the basis for this initiative. Furthermore, reference is made to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of 2000.

What is the European Commission proposing?

The aim is to eradicate poverty by 2050.

Unlike previous measures, which were based on a definition that focused primarily on a ‘lack of resources’, the Commission now applies a multidimensional definition of poverty. It seeks measures to tackle the root causes and prevent poverty, rather than merely combating it.

The direct proposals are a Council recommendation against exclusion in housing, a communication on combating child poverty and another communication on the rights of people with disabilities. Three proposals for direct action, indeed, but without any binding force.

‘Dignity, opportunities and equality’, as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put it, are the values of the Europe we want to build. However, the strategy makes no mention of inequality.

Today’s figures

The 2000 Lisbon Strategy already called for ‘decisive action’ to eradicate poverty. Its successor, the EU2020 strategy, set a target of lifting 20 million people out of poverty by 2020, but this goal was not achieved. The 2021 action plan for the European Pillar of Social Rights sets a new 2030 target: to lift at least 15 million people out of poverty, including at least 5 million children.

In 2025, 92.7 million people in the European Union – 20.9 per cent of the population (or one in five!) – were at risk of poverty and social exclusion. 19 million of them are children. 72.4 million people live in income poverty.

The figures vary greatly from country to country. In terms of poverty and social exclusion, Belgium ranks fifth, between the two extremes of the Czech Republic at 11.5 per cent and Bulgaria at 29 per cent.

The Commission’s working document², on which its strategy is based, provides a very comprehensive analysis of all the figures, the causes and the groups at risk of falling into poverty. It also discusses all existing European instruments.

In all, the Commission proposes around 16 initiatives to be launched this year or by 2027, ranging from communications and consultations to reports and examples of best practice. It also plans to develop new indicators to improve monitoring.

Once again, it is the Member States that will have to put this into practice. However, the fact that the European Commission intends to monitor and coordinate this policy is particularly positive. It may encourage the Member States to work towards an effective policy against unacceptable poverty.

Will it?

There are, however, a few snags.

No one is better at highlighting them than the European Anti-Poverty Network³ (EAPN), which is supported by the Commission. The organisation points to the many positive aspects of this strategy but also notes that the main emphasis remains on the economy and competitiveness. Too much poverty, it argues, would hinder economic growth.

Key elements such as the tax system, redistribution and the structure of the labour market remain unaddressed, even though they play a central role.

The Commission also wants to work with ‘socially responsible businesses’ and philanthropic institutions, an approach that inevitably evokes charity rather than solidarity.

EAPN welcomes the ‘multidimensional’ definition of poverty. One might question whether this is justified. Not that the many dimensions of poverty can be denied, or that they should not be addressed. The problem, however, is that the emphasis on all these dimensions risks diverting attention from the fundamental problem – insufficient income. Moreover, many of these very diverse dimensions are by no means the exclusive preserve of poor people.

A woman going through the menopause is not poor because she is going through the menopause but because her wage or benefit is too low. Older people are not poor because they are old, but because their pension is too low. Helping them with housing or culture vouchers is all well and good, but if they were to receive a decent pension, they could choose for themselves how to organise their lives.

Reflecting on this immediately brings to light a whole series of other problems that could derail the Commission’s anti-poverty strategy.

It has already been pointed out repeatedly and quite rightly that the European Union has taken numerous good and important social initiatives in recent years. The European Pillar of Social Rights is one of the most important of these, but the directives on minimum wages and platform work, as well as the recommendation on minimum incomes, are also milestones. However, they amount to nothing if, at the same time, welfare states are being dismantled at the national level, labour law is being eroded or public services are being privatised.

The measures taken by the Belgian government regarding unemployment benefits, the long-term sick, the cost-of-living index, pensions and the welfare budget are direct causes of impoverishment that no new anti-poverty strategy can counter.

The European Commission highlights the importance of decent wages, decent benefits and adequate social protection with access to good ‘social services’, but that is as far as it goes.

Whether and how the Member States will act on the Commission’s sound advice remains entirely at their discretion.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul (a lot more)

One cannot help but assess the new European poverty strategy against the European Commission’s other policies.

The poverty strategy itself has no budget. The money to support Member States is to come mainly from the European Social Fund (ESF+), but also from other instruments such as the Regional Fund, the Cohesion Fund, the FEAD (Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived) and the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’ established following the COVID crisis.

However, this says nothing about the kind of policies that will be pursued, and we know how easy it is to slap a ‘poverty label’ on just about any measure.

Above all, we do not know how much money these funds will contain. The European Union has begun discussions on the new multiannual budget for the period 2028–2034, and these are not going smoothly.

Not only does the Commission want to thoroughly reform the budget⁴ and create new ‘own resources’ through taxation, it also wants more money – up to 1.27 per cent of the Member States’ combined GDP. This does not sit well with some countries at all. On the contrary, a number of ‘frugal’ countries, led by German Chancellor Merz, want to make heavy cuts – as much as 40 per cent! Even though the Commission is proposing to renationalise a large part of policy – thereby sidelining the European Parliament – less money means less support, and less support means fewer measures to tackle poverty.

As part of the ‘semester’ for economic and monetary policy, countries receive specific recommendations that often concern social policy. Poverty is increasingly mentioned in this context, but not infrequently at the same time as opposition to comprehensive social protection. The whole situation can become highly contradictory.

Omnibus and the ‘28th regime’

Small snags can turn into major problems. The new ideology that has taken hold in the European institutions argues that rules and bureaucracy hinder competition. And so, deregulation is needed. The Commission is fully engaged in this, initially in the field of environmental legislation. Even texts that have only recently been approved are set to be scrapped. During the debate on the first ‘omnibus’ text in the European Parliament, the right-wing EPP Group unhesitatingly called on the votes of the far-right groups. There are currently around six more ‘omnibus’ texts in the pipeline, and this could well happen again. It is not inconceivable that social legislation will also be dismantled in this way.

Labour law is also being targeted, and not just through deregulation. In the now-famous report written by Mario Draghi⁵ on the future of the Union, there was a proposal that was not immediately crystal clear to everyone. It proposes a ‘28th⁶ regime’ for companies. Thanks to a concrete proposal from the European Commission in March 2026, it has now become clear. ‘Innovative’ companies would be able to obtain European registration – that is, to register within 48 hours in a country of their choice and then operate in all other Member States. It is now known as ‘EU Inc’.

That sounds good, but it entails considerable risks. Proposals for a European company have been around for a long time, but they always met with resistance from the business community. Now the situation is different: businesses are asking for it themselves, precisely because it allows them to avoid so much regulation. Nothing prevents a company from registering in a country with either a low tax rate or weak social protection and then operating in other, more expensive Member States.

The Commission’s proposal says very little about this and states that anything not regulated will remain subject to national law. That is highly questionable. In fact, it throws the door wide open to letterbox companies registered in one country but operating in many others. This allows troublesome trade unions and collective agreements to be circumvented.

A European social model?

In their annual report on social policy in the European Union, the Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute ask whether and how the uniquely European ‘social model’ can survive.

Given the recent past, the question may seem exaggerated, but tensions are mounting and the context is changing. According to the report, it is no longer simply a matter of balancing economic and social interests but of the institutional and fiscal foundations that are disappearing. The entire ideological framework is different today.

European leaders are well aware that a resilient welfare state is needed to build ‘strategic autonomy’; they know that social investment and security reinforce one another. However, if such investment is intended solely to boost productivity, that resilience is not guaranteed.

It is all too easily forgotten that the basis of competitiveness, always and everywhere, is the people who do the work. The poverty strategy must therefore be seen as nothing more than a basket of good intentions.

The European Commission’s new poverty strategy is, of course, very welcome. Poverty is utterly unacceptable in wealthy Western and Central Europe. However, as long as such a strategy is undermined by the dismantling of national social protection, we will get nowhere. Worse still, we will end up back at the World Bank’s old strategy of replacing welfare states with an anti-poverty policy.

With neoliberalism on the wane, a new era is dawning, the ideological context of which is not yet fully understood. There is now increasing talk of ‘care’, a concept stemming from ecological and gender theory that may well become the new anchor point for a different kind of social policy. Social security as we know it in Western Europe stands little chance of survival and will have to be thoroughly rethought. Hopefully, trade unions and other civil society organisations are already hard at work on this, because certain fundamental principles are worth fighting hard for. This is what lies ahead: a period of struggle to strengthen both socio-economic rights and social cohesion, with and for everyone.