Solidarity via the EU Budget and its Implications in Emergencies

1. Introduction

The legal understanding of solidarity in EU law has long been characterized by an underlying ambiguity. Its significant pre-legal heritage has deeply shaped, and often complicated, the effort to confer it an autonomous legal meaning. ¹ Scholarly interpretations continue to diverge with respect to the place of solidarity in Union law, its underlying rationale and the scope of its application. This indeterminacy becomes even more pronounced when one seeks to ascertain the role that solidarity performs within the EU budget, thereby generating a second layer of uncertainty. Addressing this nexus requires legal analysis to engage with the operational realities of EU public finances, where solidarity functions as a key indicator of the degree of fiscal integration, situating the Union between the loose financial coordination typical of international organizations and the more centralized budgetary authority of federal states. ²

Institutional debate has drawn attention to this dynamic, highlighting the idea that the EU budget is, or is becoming, ‘a powerful expression of European solidarity,’ ³ while the Court has recognized this relationship in legal terms. ⁴ Legal scholarship has also engaged with this relationship. One line of reasoning views solidarity as a normative justification for stretching, or even expanding, the EU's fiscal capacity under the current constraints of the Treaties. ⁵ Another focuses on how solidarity organizes the functioning of budgetary instruments, whether by emphasizing its role in facilitating interstate redistribution, ⁶ enabling collective responses to shared risks, ⁷ or governing the responsible use of common resources. ⁸ These analyses, however, diverge in their legal assessment of solidarity, both as regards its nature within the EU legal order and its underlying rationale and, consequently, in their accounts of how solidarity shapes EU budget, particularly in times of crisis. This divergence leaves room for further reflection, not least when considered against the backdrop of a transforming EU budgetary architecture.

Against this background, this paper advances the argument that, when interpreted in its interstate dimension, solidarity can be framed as a principle of EU law endowed with a distributive mandate, enabling the Union and its Member States to act in order to prevent or correct the asymmetries generated by the design of common policies and actions. It argues that, despite the frequent absence of explicit textual references, the principle of solidarity finds concrete expression in EU law and, specifically, within the EU budget, where it particularly shapes the architecture of EU spending in both ordinary circumstances and situations of emergency.

To this end, section 2 examines the legal status, rationale, scope and operational dynamics of solidarity, both between the EU and its Member States and among the Member States through the EU. Section 3 analyses how the EU budget operates as a vector of interstate solidarity and identifies the instruments through which solidarity is operationalized. Section 4 explores the ways in which solidarity shapes the structure of support provided by the EU to the Member States, or among the Member States via the EU budget, in emergency contexts. Section 5 reflects on the transformation of the EU budget into a more flexible policy instrument, as well as the progressive entrenchment and expansion of solidarity within it. Section 6 offers concluding remarks.

2. On the Legal Dimension of Solidarity in EU Law

In recent years, the Court of Justice has repeatedly recognized solidarity, particularly in its interstate dimension, as one of the general principles of EU law. ⁹ References to this legal characterization are not new to the Court's case law and have also appeared in several Opinions of Advocates General, which describe solidarity as a principle with a ‘fundamental’, ‘structural’ or ‘constitutional’ dimension within the EU legal order. ¹⁰ This interpretation, which enjoys substantial support in the academic literature, ¹¹ can hardly be dismissed as a mere obiter dictum, as some authors suggest. ¹² Rather than being overturned, this understanding of solidarity appears to have been repeatedly reaffirmed in EU case law, supporting the conclusion that it has become part of the Union's acquis.

The rationale of solidarity has been marked by more uncertain contours. This ambiguity has already been interpreted as indicating that the principle has an evolving meaning and serves as a source of flexibility within the EU legal order. ¹³ This reading captures and justifies the deployment of solidarity as a mechanism to support expanded EU fiscal action or to stretch Treaty constraints, a deployment that a competing view criticizes for reducing solidarity to a purely rhetorical device. ¹⁴ An alternative reading may be suggested if flexibility is understood not as inherent to the rationale of solidarity, but rather accompanying its deployment within the EU legal order. On this view, solidarity may be interpreted as a principle with a more precise purpose in EU law, namely introducing a concern for fairness in relations both among the Member States and between them and the EU. ¹⁵ More specifically, the principle of solidarity carries a distributive mandate, aiming to prevent or correct asymmetries in the allocation of burdens and benefits among the Member States arising from the design of EU policies and actions. ¹⁶ This purpose is reflected in a formula recurrent in the case law of the Court of Justice, according to which solidarity safeguards the ‘balance between the advantages and obligations’ flowing from EU membership. ¹⁷ This distributional dimension becomes particularly apparent in the way solidarity realizes its mandate, guiding the allocation of economic or material resources – such as loans, grants or medical equipment – and the distribution of burdens – such as relocation quotas or national contributions to the EU budget – among Member States. ¹⁸

It is, however, important to note that solidarity aims not only to assist its immediate beneficiaries but also to generate long-term advantages for the Union as a whole. Solidarity directs distributive actions in favour of the recipient, on the premise that such actions ultimately protect the common interest. ¹⁹ This does not entail that diverging national interests should be neglected, but rather that they must be taken into account within a process of careful balancing. ²⁰ The common interest thus serves as the cohesive force of the integration process. Whereas solidaristic bonds between individuals are rooted in a shared sense of belonging to a community, Member States are bound together by the pursuit of the common interest, which operates as a functional substitute for such collective identity. Notwithstanding the absence of a precise definition, the common interest may therefore be inferred teleologically from the EU constitutional structure, ²¹ in particular from the objectives set out in Article 3 TEU, as subsequently operationalized through sectoral policies.

Some interpreters tend to confine the material scope of solidarity to those policy areas in which the principle is expressly mentioned, often relying on its sector-specific invocations in the Treaties, the Court of Justice's context-specific references, and its uneven development across different fields of EU law. ²² However, like other general principles of EU law, ²³ solidarity may be regarded as possessing inherent normative force that permits its application irrespective of any specific written provision expressly referring to it. This interpretation finds support, first, in the Court's reasoning in Germany v. Poland, where it departed from Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona's characterization of solidarity as a field-specific ‘guiding principle’ ²⁴ and affirmed its broader, cross-sectoral relevance. ²⁵ Second, textual references to solidarity in the Treaties appear in domains where, following the Lisbon reforms, Member States undertook substantial transfers of sovereign competences, most notably the CFSP, the AFSJ and energy policy. These are areas typically marked by pronounced tensions between the Union's common interest and divergent national preferences, and where interstate solidarity, far from being fully realized, still requires further development. Moreover, even in the absence of any explicit reference, solidarity appears to guide the operation of several Treaty provisions, including Article 176 TFEU and those designed for emergency situations, such as Article 78(3) TFEU, ²⁶ as well as a number of instruments within the EU budget, as will be shown below.

The principle of solidarity structures the relationships among the Member States and between them and the Union along three principal normative dynamics. First, solidarity may guide the (re)structuring of common actions to account for the differing capacities of individual Member States, meaning that some Member States may be expected to contribute more than others. ²⁷ An illustrative example is the allocation formula of the GNI-based resource of the EU budget, which requires Member States to contribute in proportion to their economic capacity. ²⁸

Secondly, solidarity may guide common actions, whether fully or partially, in favour of one or more Member States, with the aim of creating or restoring the conditions of fairness necessary for implementing common policies and sustaining the interdependence generated by EU actions. A clear example is the financial, technical and operational support provided by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) to Member States whose asylum systems are under disproportionate strain from high volumes of applications by third-country nationals. Despite inherent challenges, these actions help sustain the viability of the Common European Asylum System and integrated border management.

Thirdly, solidarity most clearly manifests its legal potential in emergency contexts, where it is also most frequently invoked. Such situations tend to exacerbate existing asymmetries, thereby increasing the need for corrective and rebalancing measures. In these circumstances, solidarity may structure the provision of support from the Union and/or the Member States to a Member State affected by an external shock or lacking the structural capacity to prevent or manage a crisis. A notable example is the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, which provides operational assistance through coordinated emergency response, technical expertise and the deployment of specialized teams and equipment to Member States affected by natural or man-made disasters. ²⁹ This assistance is supplied either voluntarily by Member States contributing resources or through a strategic reserve of capacities directly financed by the Union, such as firefighting aircraft and medical stockpiles, which enables the Union to act more autonomously when national capabilities prove insufficient.

3. Solidarity via the EU Budget

Neither the Treaty provisions governing the budget, namely Articles 315–325 TFEU, nor the Financial Regulation, ³⁰ which operationalizes those provisions through detailed implementing rules, makes any explicit reference to solidarity. Notwithstanding this absence, solidarity is closely connected with the EU budget. ³¹ In the twin judgments on the Budget Conditionality Mechanism, the Court recognized this link, holding that ‘the Union budget is one of the principal instruments for giving practical effect, in the Union's policies and activities, to the principle of solidarity.’ ³²

Budgetary scholarship typically conceptualizes the relationship between solidarity and the budget through the lens of fiscal equalization mechanisms, which allow central governments to autonomously collect and redistribute revenue across subnational entities. ³³ Within the EU, however, such mechanisms are largely absent due to the Union's lack of a genuine fiscal capacity. ³⁴ This limitation stems from the EU's restricted taxation powers and its reliance on intergovernmental bargaining, which together hinder the development of a fully-fledged redistributive system, and is further constrained by the reduced size of the EU budget itself. Nonetheless, the EU budget offers institutional channels for solidarity, particularly on the spending side, where the principle shapes the design of instruments involving distributive actions among the Member States.

The oldest and most direct expression of solidarity among the Member States via the EU budget is provided by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is the only policy area almost entirely financed by the EU. ³⁵ Within this policy area, the distributive rationale of solidarity is reflected and operationalized through the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund, which finances direct payments to farmers and market support measures, and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, which co-finances rural development programmes in the Member States. ³⁶ Both funds allocate substantial resources from the EU budget to Member States, particularly those with sizeable agricultural sectors or lower levels of economic development. In line with the rationale of solidarity, distributive actions under those funds are not ends in themselves. They rather pursue common interests, whose nucleus is enshrined in Article 39 TFEU, including, inter alia, ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers and reducing regional disparities, and is further developed by the objectives laid down in Article 6, Regulation (EU) 2021/2115, which governs the CAP for 2023–2027.

Within the framework of the CAP's first pillar, ³⁷ which concerns direct payments and market measures, solidarity guides not only the mechanisms through which transfers are delivered from the EU to Member States but also the design of corrective measures intended to enhance the distributive impact of EU intervention. Accordingly, direct payments and income support provide farmers with a basic level of financial support based on the number of hectares farmed, with the objective of stabilizing agricultural incomes across the Union, particularly in less competitive or structurally disadvantaged regions. ³⁸ Historically, direct payments have varied significantly across Member States, primarily due to legacy entitlements based on past productivity and historical benchmarks. To address these long-standing disparities and promote a more equitable distribution of CAP support, the EU has progressively implemented an external convergence mechanism. This mechanism concretely articulates solidarity through calibrated formulas ³⁹ and adjustment quotas ⁴⁰ and aims to gradually raise the average level of direct payments in lower-support countries (such as Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland) while decreasing support in countries where payment levels remain above the EU average (such as the Netherlands, Germany and Malta). Complementary instruments, such as capping, which limits the total amount that large farms can receive, and degressivity, which reduces payments above certain thresholds, further redirect funding toward smaller agricultural holdings within each Member State, thereby reinforcing the overall distributive objective. ⁴¹

Cohesion Policy represents another area traditionally guided by the principle of solidarity. ⁴² Here, this principle guides the functioning of the EU Structural Funds, including the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund Plus, the Cohesion Fund and the Just Transition Fund. ⁴³ The distributional mandate of solidarity is operationalized through criteria that determine both eligibility for financial support and the allocation of resources among Member States and regions, with priority traditionally given to less developed areas based on indicators such as GDP and GNI per capita. ⁴⁴ For instance, access to the Cohesion Fund is limited to Member States with a GNI per capita below 90% of the EU average. ⁴⁵ By contrast, while all Member States are eligible for the Just Transition Fund, its allocation methodology, combining economic and social indicators, ensures a concentration of support in regions most affected by the green transition. ⁴⁶

Within the framework of cohesion policy, solidarity does not justify economic transfers as an end in themselves. Instead, it operates in the service of the common interests set out in Article 174 TFEU, most notably the reduction of regional disparities and the promotion of harmonious and balanced development across the Union. Through the financing of measures that stimulate economic activity and strengthen human capital in less developed regions, cohesion policy traditionally deploys resources to rebalance growth trajectories and to foster a more equitable pattern of development among Member States and their territories.

Legal scholarship has highlighted a shift in cohesion policy away from its original focus on reducing disparities in lagging regions, with wealthier or already developed regions increasingly benefiting from cohesion funding. ⁴⁷ This development has been linked in part to the recalibration of allocation criteria, whereby the weight traditionally accorded to GDP has been reduced in favour of indicators such as educational attainment, greenhouse gas emissions and migration. ⁴⁸ These changes, whose distributive implications may be debated, reflect the discretionary space available to EU actors in giving concrete effect to the principle of solidarity. Although such developments may raise questions about the capacity of cohesion policy to deliver social justice (often referred to as de facto solidarity), they do not diminish the role or significance of solidarity as a guiding principle of this policy and of the instruments built upon it, unless they were ultimately to deprive the principle of any meaningful scope.

4. Solidarity via the EU Budget in Emergencies

The principle of solidarity is frequently invoked in emergencies. In such contexts, solidarity guides the Union and the Member States in supporting a State affected by an external shock or lacking the capacity to prevent or manage a crisis. This support enables the recipient State to continue fulfilling its Treaty obligations while also preventing or mitigating spillover effects on other Member States. ⁴⁹

The role that solidarity can play via the EU budget in times of emergency is far from straightforward. The budget's inherent rigidity sits uneasily with the flexibility that solidarity-based action typically demands. Designed to ensure predictability, support long-term investment and enable programmatic spending, the EU budget has historically prioritized market correction and territorial convergence rather than rapid crisis response. ⁵⁰ Moreover, the EU budget cannot be adjusted automatically to provide emergency support, as it is capped at roughly 1% of the EU's GNI, cannot run deficits and is bound by a seven-year MFF, constraints that severely limit its capacity for real-time fiscal adjustment.

At the same time, multiple crises affecting the EU, including natural disasters, financial shocks, pandemics and armed conflicts, have underscored the need for greater adaptability, prompting the EU budget to evolve into a more flexible and responsive instrument. ⁵¹ This evolution is advancing along two distinct fronts, which now constitute the most concrete manifestations of how the principle of solidarity guides the architecture of the EU budget.

At one level, solidarity guides the creation of targeted EU-level instruments aimed at providing short-term liquidity support to Member States facing emergencies. It shapes mechanisms through which the EU budget operates as a second-line response, complementing, rather than substituting for, Member States’ primary interventions. Sectoral funds, such as the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund, have progressively incorporated internal crisis reserves, each tailored to address clearly defined sector-specific disruptions. ⁵² In addition, the EU budget has been equipped with permanent emergency instruments that operate outside traditional sectoral envelopes while remaining within the overall budgetary framework. These instruments may be thematic, designed to address specific emergencies, such as the Solidarity and Emergency Aid Reserve, or non-thematic, intended to cover unforeseen circumstances, as exemplified by the Flexibility Instrument. ⁵³

At another level, the principle of solidarity shapes the EU budget's emergency response in the field of macroeconomic stabilization. The borrowing-for-lending and borrowing-for-spending mechanisms, grounded primarily in the emergency provisions set out in Articles 122(1) and/or (2) and 143 TFEU, enable the Union to mitigate the effects of asymmetric economic shocks by providing emergency financial assistance to Member States in financial distress.

Borrowing for lending has traditionally been regarded as the most visible expression of solidarity via the EU budget in emergencies. ⁵⁴ Under this model, the European Commission borrows funds on the capital markets on behalf of the Union and lends them to Member States on favourable terms. ⁵⁵ As the loans are repaid by the beneficiaries, this mechanism does not create budgetary expenditure in the strict sense. The EU budget nonetheless provides the necessary backing, typically through guarantees or provisioning, to reassure investors in case of default. ⁵⁶ This enables the Union to leverage its high credit rating to provide cost-effective financial assistance while remaining compliant with the no-deficit rule in Article 310 TFEU. Notable examples include the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM), SURE, and, albeit only in part, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), which offered favourable loans to the Member States experiencing periods of acute financial distress. ⁵⁷

Borrowing for spending represents an evolution of the EU budget's macroeconomic response to emergencies. Introduced with Next Generation EU (NGEU), this model enables the European Commission to borrow funds on the capital markets on behalf of the Union and allocate them not only as loans but also as grants or direct budgetary expenditure for EU-level programmes and Member State recovery plans. ⁵⁸ In contrast with the previous model, borrowing for spending generates genuine EU-level expenditure, as the borrowed funds are repaid not by the recipient Member States but by the EU budget itself over time. A dedicated repayment mechanism, supported by increased own-resources ceilings and potential new EU revenue streams, ⁵⁹ has been established to ensure that the Union can meet its repayment obligations.

The distributive mandate of solidarity shapes the allocation criteria of the grants distributed through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), directing resources among Member States in light of both pre-existing asymmetries and those generated by the COVID-19 crisis. Differentiated need is operationalized through a combination of structural indicators, including population, relative economic capacity and structural labour-market fragilities, subsequently adjusted to reflect the uneven macroeconomic impact of the pandemic. ⁶⁰ In this respect, transfers are designed not only to fulfil a stabilizing function, but also to advance longer-term common interests, namely the reduction of economic disparities among the Member States and the strengthening of cohesion within the Union. These objectives are pursued through a more integrated form of risk-pooling than that envisaged under the borrowing-for-lending model, relying on collective debt issuance and a form of supranational financial redistribution. ⁶¹

5. Solidarity, Flexibility and the Dynamics of Budgetary Hybridization

The EU budget is also witnessing a complementary trend towards hybridization. While long-term policy instruments are increasingly adapted to crisis-related financial needs, short-term crisis instruments are progressively being extended to support longer-term, redistributive and capacity-building goals. This dynamic suggests that, within the EU budget, solidarity increasingly operates alongside flexibility, supporting the capacity of the EU budget to reallocate resources and mobilize additional funding to respond to unforeseen circumstances or evolving priorities.

The ‘crisification’ of instruments originally designed to deliver long-term solidarity is particularly evident in cohesion policy and the CAP. Where dedicated instruments, such as sectoral or thematic reserves, are limited or insufficient, mechanisms aimed at supporting structural development and socio-economic convergence are increasingly repurposed to address short-term shocks, enabling the Union to provide rapid financial assistance to Member States in distress. The adaptive use of cohesion funding emerged prominently during the COVID-19 pandemic, ⁶² when unspent allocations were swiftly redirected to health measures and economic support, and it was later replicated in the EU's response to the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine ⁶³ and to the floods that struck several Central and Eastern European Member States. ⁶⁴ Similar dynamics can also be observed within the CAP, where unspent funds already allocated within national envelopes under the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development have been mobilized to provide emergency support to farmers and rural enterprises in response to both the COVID-19 pandemic ⁶⁵ and the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. ⁶⁶

Expanded internal flexibility within funds does not alter the allocation methodology applied across Member States, nor does it reallocate resources between national envelopes. What has changed is the purposes for which pre-allocated envelopes could be used. This increased flexibility impacts the priorities that respective policies could finance, the territories and beneficiaries eligible for support, and the speed at which funds could be mobilized and spent. For this reason, it has raised concerns about its implications for the delivery of long-term policy objectives and the capacity of the instruments involved to ensure distributive justice. ⁶⁷

The 2028–2034 MFF is intended to institutionalize this form of crisis-driven flexibility, making it a structural feature of EU spending programmes. Under the proposed framework, a wide range of EU policies – including cohesion policy, the CAP, the Common Fisheries Policy, as well as migration and internal security – would be integrated into a single Fund. ⁶⁸ Within this integrated architecture, national spending would be set out in National and Regional Partnership Plans, where flexibility would play a more prominent role. In particular, during the MFF, a quarter of each national allocation would be set aside in a flexibility reserve to support, inter alia, crisis management. ⁶⁹ In addition, Member States would be able to request amendments to their Plans in order to reallocate unspent resources within their national envelopes to address crises or emerging policy priorities, without requiring a full revision of the legislative framework. ⁷⁰

An opposite trend of ‘normalization’ can be observed in relation to instruments originally conceived as crisis-management tools, which are increasingly being deployed to reinforce the financial support provided by the EU to its Member States in pursuit of long-term objectives. This trend is particularly evident in the growing reliance on the borrowing-for-lending model. Initially designed to address asymmetries arising from sudden shocks, this model has gradually been repurposed to support strategic and capacity-building objectives.

This process of normalization is especially visible in the SAFE (Security Action for Europe) instrument, introduced within the broader ReArm Europe initiatives. ⁷¹ Formally, SAFE retains the institutional features of the emergency-oriented borrowing-for-lending model, whereby the European Commission borrows on capital markets on behalf of the Union and on-lends the proceeds to Member States or eligible entities on favourable terms. As with the EFSM and SURE, financial support is granted upon request by Member States and repayment responsibility rests fully with the recipients rather than with the EU budget.

In practice, however, SAFE does not provide financial assistance to address asymmetric needs arising from an immediate economic emergency affecting the recipient State. Rather, the instrument is explicitly designed to support the financing of common defence procurement, expand industrial manufacturing capacities, improve the availability and timely delivery of defence products, and strengthen interoperability across the Union. ⁷² The potential financial strain on Member States arising from such capacity-building efforts functions primarily as the legal trigger for Union intervention, rather than as the substantive policy objective of the borrowing-for-lending mechanism. ⁷³ This marks a clear departure from earlier crisis-response tools, such as the EFSM and the SURE. ⁷⁴ In the context of SAFE, the common interest underpinning solidarity has therefore shifted, as it is no longer located primarily in the preservation of macroeconomic stability, but rather in security-driven industrial capacity-building.

The new 2028–2034 MFF aims to consolidate the use of the borrowing-for-lending model to finance long-term priorities. A new instrument, currently referred to as ‘Catalyst Europe’, ⁷⁵ would enable the EU to raise up to EUR 150 billion and on-lend it to Member States on favourable terms. ⁷⁶ Backed by the EU budget, with repayment obligations resting on the beneficiary Member States, this instrument is designed to allow Member States to finance strategic priorities – such as defence, energy infrastructure and critical technologies – set out in their National and Regional Partnership Plans, alongside allocations from the EU budget. Drawing on the experience of recent years, the proposal aims to establish a spending architecture that avoids recourse to emergency legal bases, whose use is currently under critical scrutiny, ⁷⁷ for the rapid financing of new policy priorities, thereby enabling solidarity to be deployed through a less legally contentious framework. In doing so, it also departs from the traditional approach to the EU budget as a programming instrument, signalling a shift towards a more interventionist form of budgetary support capable of adapting to evolving policy priorities and, where necessary, scaling up Union financing.

6. Conclusion

For a long time, any close association between solidarity and the EU budget appeared implausible, given, on the one hand, the political reluctance surrounding appeals to solidarity and, on the other hand, the EU budget's modest size, programmatic structure and operational constraints. ⁷⁸ Over successive Multiannual Financial Frameworks, this relationship has evolved significantly, and the EU budget is now increasingly portrayed as a powerful expression of European solidarity and a key instrument for its operationalization. ⁷⁹ This article identifies two main factors underlying this shift, namely the progressive understanding of solidarity in EU law, and its increasing expression within the EU budget.

Both scholarly and judicial interpretations have contributed to the progressive emergence of interstate solidarity as a general principle of EU law. This analysis has particularly focused on its distributive mandate, which structures the allocation of benefits and the distribution of burdens arising from the design and implementation of EU policies and actions, with a view to preventing or correcting asymmetries between Member States.

Under normal conditions, the principle of solidarity has been primarily operationalized within the EU budget through its two main long-term spending pillars, namely the CAP and cohesion policy. In this context, the analysis shows how solidarity structures and justifies the distribution of common resources among Member States through EU funds, with a view to pursuing long-term objectives such as ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers, reducing regional disparities and promoting harmonious and balanced development within the Union. The analysis empasized that the distributive dimension of the principle shapes the criteria governing eligibility for financial support and the methodologies for allocating resources, as well as a range of accompanying measures designed to calibrate and adjust the distributive process.

Solidarity becomes particularly visible in times of emergency, when the EU budget is increasingly expected to provide financial support to Member States. To this end, the EU budget has progressively incorporated a variety of emergency instruments, ranging from sectoral or thematic reserves, which allocate resources to Member States affected by sudden shocks, to more complex forms of financial assistance, such as borrowing for lending and borrowing for spending, through which the EU raises and deploys financial support to Member States under strain.

Solidarity also appears to guide a more fundamental transformation of the EU budget from an accounting tool into a more structured policy instrument, whose ultimate aim is to strengthen the EU's capacity to respond financially to both emerging crises and shifting policy priorities. This evolution is occurring through a gradual hybridization of instruments that were previously compartmentalized. As the analysis shows, long-term redistributive instruments are increasingly being adapted to address crisis-related needs, while short-term crisis instruments are being repurposed to pursue longer-term redistributive and capacity-building objectives. This development, currently driven by ad hoc legislative changes, is embraced and further reinforced by the proposed 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, which aims to systematize flexibility within what was traditionally a rigid system while also increasing the capacity of the EU budget to give effect to solidarity.