V4 unites against Germany’s budget squeeze

Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary held their first formal leaders' summit in years last week in Gödöllő, Hungary. The meeting revived the Visegrad Four (V4), a regional format that collapsed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed irreconcilable positions on Moscow. The four governments have not healed those divisions. They are working around them because the EU's next seven-year budget is the fight where coordination pays.

Old Spending, New Bills, No One Wants to Cut

The EU's Multiannual Financial Framework, or MFF, is the spending plan that locks in ceilings and categories for seven years. The next one covers 2028–2034 and must be adopted by all 27 member states unanimously, with the European Parliament's consent. Any single country can hold up a deal.

Two massive spending lines have dominated the budget for decades: cohesion policy (money for poorer regions to catch up) and farm subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy. Both have powerful defenders. The problem is that new bills are piling up on the same table: defence, long-term Ukraine support, EU enlargement costs and repayment of the NextGenerationEU pandemic debt (ECA, Euronews). Something has to give. No government wants to say what.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz leads the squeeze. He has rejected a nearly two-trillion-euro budget and refused new EU common borrowing (FAZ, Zeit). The Netherlands, Austria and Sweden back a similar line: cap overall spending and don't borrow more.

On the other side, a Friends of Cohesion grouping of some 16–17 states, including Italy, Spain, Portugal and all four V4 countries, signed a declaration insisting that cohesion and CAP should not be cut to pay for new priorities (Spanish Foreign Ministry, EUNews).

A Caucus, Not a Comeback

The Gödöllő summit slots into that wider budget alliance. At the press conference, all four leaders named cohesion, CAP, energy prices and emissions-trading reform as shared priorities and agreed to resume consultations before every European Council summit (AP/SFGate, Denník N). Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said the V4 wanted to be "very strong again." Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš cited what he called an unacceptable drop in Czechia's allocation and linked V4 coordination to extracting maximum value from the budget (ČT24).

The coordination is real but bounded. Four countries acting together under unanimity don't gain a special veto they didn't already have individually, since Article 312 TFEU grants every member state that power. What they gain is political weight: a disciplined Central European caucus raises the cost of cutting cohesion and helps shape the compromise text before it reaches the final summit table. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stressed cooperation with Italy and others beyond the V4 (PAP), and Polish and Czech reporting both describe the group as a sub-caucus inside Friends of Cohesion, not a standalone bloc (Business Insider Polska, Aktuálně.cz).

German sources confirm this reading from the other side. Merz acknowledged that his savings line was not the majority opinion among leaders (n-tv). Berlin treats the budget fight as a conventional payer-versus-recipient negotiation, not a special Visegrad problem.

Allies Today, Competitors Tomorrow

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni convened the Friends of Cohesion meeting ahead of the June European Council (where heads of state set EU direction) and argued that cohesion and CAP should not subsidise new spending lines (Sky TG24). On the budget, Rome needs Eastern votes against frugal cuts.

But Italian media flag the uncomfortable next chapter: EU enlargement eastward, especially Ukrainian accession, could shift agricultural and cohesion money toward newer members, squeezing current Southern recipients (Quotidiano Nazionale). The countries defending EU funds are aligned against cuts now, but will face internal competition once the envelope is fixed and governments divide what remains.

No public V4 document with concrete budget demands or red lines emerged from Gödöllő (Telex). Final country allocation tables for the 2028–2034 MFF do not yet exist, so current claims about winners and losers remain bargaining positions. The press conference showed the easy part: agreeing that someone else should pay. The real test comes when the Commission puts numbers beside each country's name.