Speech by the Eurogroup President, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, at the 'Annual EU Budget Conference 2026 – Boost Europe: Leveraging the EU Budget for strategic priorities' 12:30[...]

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It is a great privilege and a great pleasure to be joining you today. I am particularly pleased because the topic that we are discussing is one that, in my dual capacity as Finance Minister of Greece and President of the Eurogroup, I am naturally reflecting extensively upon. And the question framing today's conference could not be more timely:

How does the European budget support the euro?

The usual answer begins with the programmes that the European budget finances: Cohesion, research and innovation, infrastructure, agriculture, defence, energy security, support for Ukraine.

Those priorities obviously matter enormously. But I think that we could place them under the title described before by the Commissioner - as well as by a title used by one of my favorite newspapers: "How to spend it?"

Let me suggest an additional perspective. Let me switch to the perspective of how to generate it.

The European budget supports the euro not only through what it finances, but it supports it through the economic logic that it embodies. Ultimately, the euro cannot be stronger than the economy that stands behind it.

Markets do not invest in currencies alone. They invest in the productive capacity, resilience and credibility of the economies that issue them. And today, the global, the European and our national economies are being reshaped.

Technology is the obvious strategic asset. Energy has become a question of security. Economic dependencies increasingly translate into geopolitical vulnerabilities.

And in such a world, resilience is no longer simply the ability to absorb shocks, it has become a source of competitiveness. And competitiveness is, à la Draghi, the foundation of monetary strength.

This changes the way in which we should be thinking about the Multiannual Financial Framework.

Because the MFF is not simply about financing our priorities. It's about strengthening our long-term capacity to generate prosperity. And for us, in the context of this discussion and this negotiation, we should try to switch the discussion from a zero-sum game of spending towards a positive-sum game.

Let me use a specific example after setting an additional context.

We don't have a shortage of ambitions. Our ambitions are increasing every single year.

Whether we speak about technological leadership, defence, energy security, capital markets or cohesion, every single European priority depends on the same foundation: how to increase our productivity? I mentioned the zero-sum game because the question is not how to allocate existing scarce resources, or it shouldn't only be about that. It's whether we can create an entirely new European capacity.

Our greatest achievements never came from redistributing existing resources more efficiently. They came from creating entirely new economic value.

The European Coal and Steel Community transformed strategic industries into a common economic foundation.

The Single Market transformed national economies into one continental marketplace.

The Savings and Investments Union is trying to do the same for capital markets and banks.

They all follow this principle. The principle is we succeed when we achieve scale, when we eliminate fragmentation. This is how we translate scale into value.

This proposition is not abstract. And let me use a very specific example. Radio spectrum, telecom spectrum.

It's one of our most valuable strategic assets. It underpins artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, autonomous mobility, satellite connectivity, secure communications, and next generation defence capabilities.

Yet, we continue to organise this asset through 27 separate auction systems. Each with different timelines, different license conditions, different investment incentives, and 27 different regulators.

The result is fragmentation. And this is precisely an area where the opportunity cost is vast. Why? Because we have European champions in that area, European champions which are effectively global champions. And we could have created even broader, even greater ecosystems around them.

Why am I connecting this discussion with the MFF discussion? First of all, the opportunity cost of not deployment here is quite vast.

Imagine a telecom company interacting in the United States with one single regulator. Imagine the same company interacting with 27 in Europe.

5G is a strategic asset, as is 6G. As we are preparing for the 6G assignments, and progressively the renewal of the existing 5G licenses, we have an opportunity to rethink how we organise one of Europe's most valuable common assets.

With my hat as Greek Minister of Finance let me very briefly say what we did in Greece. We had a technology deployment auction in 2020. It was not a revenue-maximising one. We wanted a quick rollout of the spectrum. And we used 25% of the auction proceeds to create a fund, which then invested in the ecosystem of 5G, in the application of 5G.

Why? Because we grasped that the value of 5G would not come from the infrastructure itself. It would come from the ecosystem around it. The problem with this idea is that it's deployed in a single EU member state and not across all the 27.

We do not have a synchronisation of the spectrum frequency auctions. But had we done this centrally, solely for the specific frequences, we would have more predictability in the market for our infrastructural players.

Let us for a moment imagine the counterfactual. Synchronising the auctions and using the proceeds, or a big part of it, for the MFF as an own resource. Plus using the 25%, that I mentioned in the Greek case, to create a fund. Let's imagine of endowing the EIB with the proceeds to create an even bigger fund to invest in G6 applications of the next generation. If we did that, we would be creating something broader than bringing a new own resource for the MFF.

We would be unlocking potential in an area where Europe has global technology champions and it would be unlocking more funding capabilities for them. It wouldn't be a zero-sum game, it would be a positive-sum game.

And as the Commissioner is doing a great job by grasping the lessons of the RRF, linking reforms to specific funding priorities - which is a must in order to fully unlock the potential of every single European member state, and the reform capabilities in order to generate more economic activity - we need to think a little bit more out of the box in terms of what would be unlocking European value. And which would then translate into national value for all of us.

Europe has always advanced by turning common challenges into common opportunities. The next MFF has the potential to do the same: it should not simply determine how we allocate scarce resources.

It should help create new European resources, mobilise new investment and expand Europe's productive capacity - especially in the areas where we're sitting close to the technology frontier, and where we can indeed unlock maximum economic potential.

Confidence in the euro at the end of the day rests on confidence in Europe's economy, and this is how the European budget can, and I believe will, make its greatest contribution to our common currency.

Thank you very much.